Hello and welcome to more or less the show that explores the numbers all around us in the news and in life.

Professor John Horton Conway died on the 11th of April at the age of 82.

Princeton University, where he'd worked for many years, reported that the cause of death was complications related to COVID-19.

It's a sad loss, but Conway lived a rich life as a mathematician and as a player and designer of games.

I spoke with stand-up mathematician Matt Parker, the author of Humble Pie, about his memories of Conway.

But you met John Horton Conway more than once, I think.

Yes, so I used to regularly go to these recreational math conferences in the US, where people who do math as a hobby get together.

And John Conway, as well as being a very serious influential mathematician, was also, I guess, a recreational mathematician.

They would do fun bits of mathematics on the side and so I met John at several of these conferences.

And what was he lying?

So I and he knew John at the very end of his career.

And he, by then, was always swamped with people.

So whenever I saw him, he was at one of these conferences where he was like a maths deity who was there.

And you've got to give it to him.

From the moment he showed up at the conference to the moment he finished,

there was always someone who wanted to talk with him, chat with him.

And he had a seemingly infinite amount of patience.

So he would happily sit there and talk about mathematics, which to be fair was the basis of his career from the beginning of the day until the very end.

So the guy was relentless in his dedication to math.

Now, I wanted to ask you about life, the cellular, automator Conway invention.

I do so with a little bit of hesitation because I know that it was like his hit single from his youth,

that he was fed up that everyone kept asking him to play over and over again.

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