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PrincetonUniversity
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(Photograph by Peter Murphy)
Thinking About Math. It's Wednesday night, and the
lecture room in Jadwin Hall is filling up fast. Well before
the speaker is scheduled to start, there's not a seat to be
had; nearly 200 students, professors, professionals and even
local high-school students cram themselves into every bit of
floor space.
A large man with a wiry gray beard and a
T-shirt printed with a design by M.C. Escher walks to the
front of the hall: John Conway, John Von Neumann Professor
in Applied and Computational Mathematics. With a brief quip
about how he wasn't sure he'd have an audience, he begins
his lecture on "The Archimedes Palimpsest: Why Should We
Care?" This is the first in a series of eight public
lectures titled "Thinking about Math (and Many Other
Things)."
Conway is passionate about connecting
people to math. "I really love my subject, and I want to
spread it as widely as I can--to spread the gospel," he
says. ...
• Department of Mathematics home page
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