John Conway was born on 26 December 1937 in Liverpool, England, UK. He was married to Diana Cutsogeorge, Eileen Howe and Larissa Queen. He died on 11 April 2020 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.
He earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he later became a professor of mathematics. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1981. In 1987, he became the John von Neumann professor of applied and computational mathematics at Princeton University.