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Wait, I though Bourbaki was a collaborative (a group of people), not an actual person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
RIP.
I went to Canada/USA Mathcamp in 2009, which fell in the period when he would come for about a week, giving talks and just hanging out with all us kids. You might have lunch with him and he'd talk about his "Free Will Theorem", or the Doomsday Algorithm[1]. He would often play games with us in the afternoon. I remember seeing him play Phutball[2], a game of his own design, taking heavy handicaps. One afternoon, he challenged us to 3x3 Dots and Boxes. Each challenger "won" if they could win a single game against him in a match of 10. You got to choose each game whether you went first. We played for an hour or so, a crowd gathered around the piece of paper he was using, everyone offering suggestions and trying to figure it out. I think the 5th or 6th challenger finally managed to win.
In 2008 I was living in New York city and Conway gave a series of lectures at Princeton on quantum physics and the "free will" theorem [2]. I was able to take the train down to Princeton to see a couple of them, and it was awesome. He was a bit shaky at first because he had just had a health scare, but he soon got into the swing of things.
I would highly recommend the biography: "Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway" by Siobhan Rob. It is a lot of fun!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold_notation [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079
I only once saw John Conway giving a talk. I don't remember the topic (it was >20y ago), but I remember how it went. He gave some definitions, then started to give some examples and work out on the blackboard some calculations. It all felt quite trivial. At some point one calculation doesn't work out. He checked again, but still it didn't work. He started pacing in front of the blackboard, and said that this is quite…
> Rumor has it that extensive interactions with a host of mathematical luminaries are covered, [...] and the French didactic auteur Nicolas Bourbaki. Wait, I though Bourbaki was a collaborative (a group of people), not an actual person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
People here might know him best for the "Game of Life"[0], but he did so much more. The book about Conway by Siobhan Roberts is an interesting read about the man and his work. There's a review here.[1] Some will know Conway via is work on the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (with many others), some via his "Look and Say" sequence, while still others will know his book "Winning Ways"[2], written with Richard Gu…