Name: Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays
ISBN: 9781568811444

Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays

In the quarter of a century since three mathematicians and game theorists collaborated to create Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, the book has become the definitive work on the subject of mathematical games. Now carefully revised and broken down into four volumes to accommodate new developments, the Second Edition retains the original's wealth of wit and wisdom. The authors' insightful strategies, blended with their witty and irreverent style, make reading a profitable pleasure. In Volume 4, the authors present a Diamond of a find, covering one-player games such as Solitaire.

What Hacker News says

aeonikApr 2026

My votes for relatively modern stuff: Ed Witten: Unification of various forms of string theory.

Category theory and the work building programming langauges on top of that.

If the whole thing pans out: Langlands Program (unifying most of mathematics).

Wofram Language and the math capability is pretty amazing for such a small team.

Anything that CERN touches, from the web to various quantum theories.

Genetic mapping and science.

The Lambda CDM model, and all the work that goes into constraining their predictions with limited data is pretty amazing.

Some of the things cryptanalysts and hackers do is pretty remarkable. Side channel attacks like Row hammer attacks (not strictly crypto), EM analysis, etc..., and things like hash collisions and Differential cryptanalysis.

Modern materials science is chock full of amazing intellectual achievements.

"Winning ways for your mathematical plays" as a book on game theory is a remarkable achievement by itself.

thread

shagieJan 2023

If this interests you, the series "Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays" is something to add to your bookshelf. And if you ever see "On Numbers and Games" in a used book store (the $200 price tag on Amazon is a bit hard to swallow), its another one to get.

thread

spindleNov 2022

Winning Ways For Your Mathematical Plays by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy

thread

ceviNov 2022

A few immediately come to mind:

1. Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays

2. A Singular Mathematical Promenade, available for free online: https://perso.ens-lyon.fr/ghys/promenade/

There are many other math books I really like - over the years I've collected a long list of reading recommendations: https://notzeb.com/rec.html (most of them won't fit as answers to this question)

thread

GuiAJun 2020

Been going through Conway's (and Conway related) books since his unfortunate passing. His biography by Siobhan Roberts was a great starting point to ease into it (lots of direct quotes from Conway, which makes it a very easy read that still touches on the important concepts in his work, in his own words; also highly recommend all the Numberphile videos featuring him for that)- then:

Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays is really fun to thumb through.

The Book of Numbers is fantastic and something I would gift to any mathematically curious, somewhat independent, child.

Knuth's Surreal Numbers is also a great read.

Got On Numbers and Games coming in the mail, and am trying to track down a reasonably priced copy of The Symmetries of Things.

I'm tempted to get the Atlas for my collection, but I don't think I'd actually get much from reading it (:

In non-Conway recommendations, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a huge brick of a volume, but is a very complete math encyclopedia that I love to keep on my desk and thumb through when I feel distracted. You always end up learning something new.

thread

intuitionistApr 2020

There were better contemporary mathematicians than John Conway, and there were (a handful of) better contemporary popularizers of mathematics, but no one else came close to doing both nearly as well.

I met him on a few different occasions when I was very young (middle and high school), and he was always extremely generous with his time, especially with an interlocutor not legally old enough to drink, and clearly brilliant in person. One example of his generosity was his collaboration on a book about triangle centers[0] with the late Steve Sigur, who was not a research mathematician but a high school teacher.

Of course the Game of Life is an enduring classic, but I’ll also always have fond memories of Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays and Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups (affectionately known as SPLAG). The mathematical world has truly lost a living legend.

[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Triangle_Book.html?...

thread