Boy, you wanna talk about your _cool_ books. I read this one twenty years ago and never quite got over it. Georg Cantor sure opened a can of worms with all that infinity stuff.
John Horton Conway is probably best known as the creator/discoverer of the computer game called "Life," with which he re-founded the entire field of cellular automata. What he does in this book is the _other_ thing he's best known for: he shows how to construct the "surreal numbers" (they were actually named by Donald Knuth).
Conway's method employs something like Dedekind cuts (the objects Richard Dedekind used to construct the real numbers from the rationals), but more general and much more powerful. Conway starts with the empty set and proceeds to construct the entire system of surreals, conjuring them forth from the void using a handful of recursive rules.
The idea is that we imagine numbers created on successive "days". On the first day, there's 0; on the next, -1 and +1; on the next, 2, 1/2, -1/2, and -2; on the next, 3, 3/4, 1/4, -1/4, -3/4, and -3; and so on. In the first countably-infinite round, we get all the numbers that can be written as a fraction whose denominator is a power of two (including, obviously, all the whole numbers). We can get as close to any other real number as we like, but they haven't actually been created yet at this point.
But we're just getting started. Once we get out past the first infinity, things really get weird. By the time we're through, which technically is "never," Conway's method has generated not only all the real numbers but way, way, way more besides (including more infinities than you've ever dreamed of). His system is so powerful that it includes the "hyperreal" numbers (infinitesimals and such) that emerge (by a very different route, of course) from Abraham Robinson's nonstandard analysis as a trivial special case.
So there's a lot here to get your mind around, and it's a lot of fun for readers who like to watch numbers being created out of nothing. But wait -- there's more.
See, the _full_ title of the book includes not only "numbers" but also "games". And that's the rest of the story. Conway noticed that in the board game of Go, there were certain patterns in the endgames such that each "game" looked like it could be constructed out of smaller "games". It turns out that something similar is true of all games that have certain properties, and that his surreal numbers tie into such games very nicely; "numbers" (and their generalizations) represent strategies in those games. So in the remainder of the book Conway spells this stuff out and revolutionizes the subject of game theory while he's at it.
Well, there must be maybe two or three people in the world to whom this all sounds very cool and yet who haven't already heard of this book. To you I say: read it before you die, and see how God created math.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2023
It looks awful. Like someone made it on a copy machine, from a copy of a copy of a copy..
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Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2005
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Amazon Customer
Inhaltlich Top, durcktechnisch eine Katastrophe
Reviewed in Germany on October 18, 2015
Zoltan Gyorfi
This is a brilliant book but only for the mathematical minded one
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 8, 2013