"As a student, Dr. Conway cultivated his acknowledged lifelong preference for being lazy, playing games and doing no work."

"He could be easily distracted by what he called 'nerdish delights.' He once went on a flexagon binge... [working with] 'polygons, folded from straight or crooked strips of paper, which have the fascinating property of changing their faces when they are flexed.' He built a water-powered computer, which he called Winnie (Water Initiated Nonchalantly Numerical Integrating Engine).... Hired at Cambridge as an assistant lecturer, Dr. Conway gained a reputation for his high jinks (not to mention his disheveled appearance). Lecturing on symmetry and the Platonic solids, he might bring in a turnip as a prop, carving it one slice at a time into, say, an icosahedron, with its 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went.... Dr. Conway invented a profusion of games — like Phutball (short for Philosopher’s Football, which is a little like checkers on a Go board)... [He] published the Monstrous Moonshine conjecture, investigating an elusive symmetry group that lives in 196,883 dimensions.... Asked by a reporter... about his life of the mind, he replied: 'What happens most of the time is nothing. You just can’t have ideas often.'... He gave over his summers... to teaching at math camps [where] his talks were advertised vaguely as 'John Conway Hour, NTBA' (Not to Be Announced). He would take topic requests from students and deliver an extemporaneous lecture. Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. 'He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious.... to him, fun was deep... he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.'"

From "John Horton Conway, a ‘Magical Genius’ in Math, Dies at 82/He made profound contributions to number theory, coding theory, probability theory, topology, algebra and more — and created games from it all. He died of the coronavirus" (NYT).