Over the course of two weeks, I sent four interview requests (via email) to three different people for my eminent person project. Sadly, I was not able to get a response to obtain an interview but before I get to the reasons why I wasn’t able to obtain an interview I first should explain why I chose these people or organizations.

My first email was to John Conway’s place of work also known as Princeton university’s math wing. I chose to email this organization because if I got an interview, I might be able to seek insight into what he did at the university and how he was liked there. I also was hoping that I might be able to understand more about what made him inspiring and eminent while occupying the John Van Neumann position at Princeton University.

My second email was to a journalist named Mark Alpert. When I sent him an email, I was hoping that he could give me some insight into how john Conway was important to the mathematical community. I was hoping this because he wrote many articles on John Conway’s mathematical impact on the world.

My third email was to a journalist named Siobhan Roberts. When I sent her an email, I was hoping for her to give me insight into John Conway’s eminence. I thought she could do this because she wrote numerous articles describing his eminence and his inspirational qualities.

My last email was a response to Siobhan Roberts. It was basically just a last-ditch attempt to contact my most prominent potential interviewee.

What I thought went wrong were two main points.  Number one lack of potential interviewees. On one hand, Because John Conway worked in a lot of different math subjects, he had a lot of coworkers. On the other hand, because john Conway lived to 82 before he passed, most of his coworkers were either dead or not in the right position to do an interview Because of this and the fact that none of his family had any jobs or study in mathematics, I was only able to email his place of work or people who wrote articles about him.   Number two, lack of emails. I only sent four emails to three people. I wish I was able to send more but I was not able to find the time to go through his coworkers a dozen times only to find out they had passed on.

In conclusion, I sent four emails to three people and got zero responses.  My thoughts on why this happened are I did not send enough emails to different people because there were not that many potential people to interview.

I interviewed Rean on Tuesday. I prepared eleven questions that I thought would give me some valuable and interesting insight into her. I asked  open questions like “What inspired you to join the talons program?” I also asked closed questions like “Do you have any hobbies? During the interview, I tried to stay professional, but I did not want to make her uncomfortable. I managed to get to all the eleven questions I had prepared but I was not able to expand on the responses Rean gave, for some questions I gave Rean could not answer right away because of their difficulty. I wasn’t prepared for this and received feedback that I should have asked easier questions. I got positive feedback that I stayed interested throughout the entire presentation, showing friendliness, and using an encouraging tone. Unfortunately, to appear engaged I repeated my response to Rean, saying things like “ok or cool” too many times. To get ready for an interview with an expert on my eminent person I will focus my questions about working with or studying John Conway, rather than asking for random information.  I want to improve my skills when I need to stay engaged by varying my responses. Although I think it is important to focus on responses that I find informative. I also want to go more in–depth and ask follow-up questions when I do my actual interview. Overall, I feel that I did good on the practice interview and am looking forward to the real one.   

By reading the different blog posts I was able to learn about different people from different backgrounds and different career paths. My favorite person I learned about was an inventor named Robert Noyce. He invented several things like an integrated circuit made from silicone. I also learned about an anime writer named Hideaki Anno, an army officer named Desmond Doss, a writer named Louisa May Alcott, and an American gymnast named Sunisa Lee. A few main takeaways I got from reading other blog posts were to break up my paragraph to make it sound better, to include more about john Conway’s theories to give the reader more information about what he did and to include a few videos of John Conway to make my blog post look better. Also, from reading the comments on my blog post I should talk more about him and include more photos of him.  I feel that if I implement these ideas from other people’s blogs into mine that it will take my blog from ok to great. Overall, I feel that I got a lot of useful and helpful to improve my blog out of looking at my peers’ blogs and I will try to implement some of these takeaways in the future. 

People think that mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit, it’s the stuff we CAN understand. It’s cats that are complicated. – John Conway 1937-2020

John Conway Interests me because of his work in a variety of math subjects. He studied the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory, and coding theory. He moved between subjects always learning and making new things, like the doomsday rule or the game of life. Personally, I tend to jump from new ideas to new ideas trying to learn as much as I can as fast as I can, so I feel that we have some connection. He inspires me to want to have a career in mathematics when I grow up.  I also enjoy math and have an analytical mind and I enjoy challenges. I aspire to be more open to learning and understanding new things like john Conway. I also aspire to be better at communicating with other people like him. Some challenges I could have with connecting with John Conway is that he worked with very complex math, so it could be hard to get in his headspace and that he was an adult, and I am still a kid. And because I am still a kid, I have never held a job but, he was known for his career. Even though I am still a kid I could research, learn, and study what he taught in order to have a better understanding of his work and who he was. When I grow up, I think that I will get a stronger connection when I start my career. He contributed to society and the field of mathematics by working on the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory, and coding theory. He left a ding in the universe by teaching mathematics at Princeton. I don’t think that he’s someone who will become more famous in 50 to 100 years as time goes by than he because he did not win a lot of awards and also because generally, mathematicians are not as famous as celebrities. He is worth researching because he was an inspiration to his students and peers alike. He moved through math making discoveries and teaching the public in a way that kept their interest. He wasn’t called “the world’s most charismatic mathematician” for nothing. I picked him over other mathematicians because he did not settle down and work in one field, he moved between them and shared his genius with the entirety of the math world. One of my takeaways so far from studying John Conway is that you don’t need to stay in one element. This is true not just for math but is also true for all areas of life.