The April Fool's piece from a few years ago mentions that there is a biography, which was published as "Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway" by Siobhan Roberts. I'm sure that would be a good read.
John Conway has died
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Re: John Conway has died
#32Worthy of HN border acknowledgment, please.
I had always wondered about that. Is there a full collection of info about this site? There always seem to be random things like a black bar without even a comment in code or a page like https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors that I'm not even sure how to find other than I saw someone else mention it once.
Re: John Conway has died
#33Is there any confirmation of this? It appears absolutely nowhere else on the web.
Mulcahy is a pretty reliable source, and that's definitely his twitter. In lieu of official confirmation, for the time being it seems like this is about as reliable as anybody could hope for.
Re: John Conway has died
#34I only once saw John Conway giving a talk. I don't remember the topic (it was >20y ago), but I remember how it went. He gave some definitions, then started to give some examples and work out on the blackboard some calculations. It all felt quite trivial. At some point one calculation doesn't work out. He checked again, but still it didn't work. He started pacing in front of the blackboard, and said that this is quite embarrassing. "Hm, I wanted to give a talk about this, but since we found this mistakes, I'm not sure what to say for the remaining 50 minutes". Ok, he said, let's take a step back and start again. And he started again, and the talk was amazing. The whole "embarrassing" thing had been staged. He played a bit of misdirection on us. He started with something that seemed quite trivial, pretended to make a mistake, then showed us how much deeper the topic was.
This was not the only math talk I've seen that was actually a performance, but it was the best.
Rest in peace.
Re: John Conway has died
#35As a teen, I was obsessed with knot theory, and Conway's knot notation always felt like magic to me. The notation works by counting the number of twists in a segment, and then looking for another twist directly connected to the previous twist, and so on. This gives you a sequence of integers, one counting the number (and direction) of twists. If the entire knot is made of twists connected this way, then the continued…
Can two different knots have the same integer sequence?
Re: John Conway has died
#36Is there any confirmation of this? It appears absolutely nowhere else on the web.
The Princeton Department of Mathematics page doesn't seem to have anything about his passing. Edit: Of course it's the weekend; I should have realized that there will probably not be anything on that page before Monday. https://www.math.princeton.edu/people/john-conway
It's Easter weekend, there probably wouldn't be anything before Tuesday.
I've commented elsewhere[0] on the connectedness and reliability of Colm, but people can always wait for confirmation via other sources before they choose to believe it.
Re: John Conway has died
#37Like many others, this is one of the things I programmed out as a teenager, having tired of doing it by hand. It taught me quite a lot and was fascinating besides. Later, when I went into physics, the "speed of light" made sense already as a kind of propagation of disruption and/or information transfer.
I fire a glider gun into the sky.
Re: John Conway has died
#38Worthy of HN border acknowledgment, please.
I had always wondered about that. Is there a full collection of info about this site? There always seem to be random things like a black bar without even a comment in code or a page like https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors that I'm not even sure how to find other than I saw someone else mention it once.
This is extremely off-topic, but it's a collapsed subthread already, so I think it's fine:
Black bar = honoring the dead.
/topcolors = list of colors that people have set their top bar to be.
Re: John Conway has died
#39So sad to see Conway’s Game of Life come to an end.
Re: John Conway has died
#40https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACperhaps a lesser known contribution