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John Conway has died

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Re: John Conway has died

#41

Post by ColinWright »

zamadatix wrote: post #32
keithflower wrote: post #5

Worthy 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.

Treat the site a little like a text adventure, akin to Colossal Cave Adventure or other text-based interactive fiction. HN is a world to explore, with items to uncover and treasures to discover.

There are clues ...

Re: John Conway has died

#42

Post by [deleted] »

whatshisface wrote: post #35
adeledeweylopez wrote: post #25

As 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?

[deleted]

Re: John Conway has died

#43

Post by BurningFrog »

Insanity wrote: post #14
ColinWright wrote: post #2

People here might know him best for the "Game of Life"[0], but he did so much more. The book about Conway by Siobhan Roberts is an interesting read about the man and his work. There's a review here.[1] Some will know Conway via is work on the Classification of Finite Simple Groups (with many others), some via his "Look and Say" sequence, while still others will know his book "Winning Ways"[2], written with Richard Gu…

I think many of us have indeed programmed a GoL at some point. I've repeatedly done that when learning new languages a decade ago. May he rest in peace

Yeah, I built a Game of Life way back when.

Re: John Conway has died

#44

Post by yamrzou »

wool_gather wrote: post #24

Is there any confirmation of this? It appears absolutely nowhere else on the web.

The first who tweeted about this seems to be a french mathematician named Martin Andler : https://twitter.com/MartinAndler/status/1249021279660683265. Also this tweet by the french Science Magazine "La Recherche" : https://twitter.com/maglarecherche/status/124903595451977318...

Re: John Conway has died

#46

Post by sdenton4 »

whatshisface wrote: post #35
adeledeweylopez wrote: post #25

As 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?

I'm knot familiar with this one in particular, but a 'unique' knot invariant would be a very big deal. (It would then be a knot identifier...)

Re: John Conway has died

#49

Post by wool_gather »

inetsee wrote: post #30
wool_gather wrote: post #24

Is 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

Yes, I wouldn't necessarily expect the web site to be updated immediately, but I would think there would be a tweet from https://twitter.com/princeton sometime today at least.

Re: John Conway has died

#50

Post by DoreenMichele »

ColinWright wrote: post #26
howenterprisey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, does anyone have a news source for this besides the one twitter thread? Wikipedia wants to know.

Colm is extremely well-connected in recreational mathematical circles. He's on the board of the G4G committee, and is an active mathematician and populariser of mathematics. It was he who first broke the news of Richard Guy's passing. Anything he says is reliable, but by all means wait for other confirmation. WRT wikipedia, I have a story about the Richard Guy page, but that's not a story for here. Another time.

HN now gets about 5 million visitors a month. In case it needs to be said for some of those folks, the OP -- ColinWright -- is also rather well connected from what I gather and part of that circle (of recreational mathematics, etc).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNKFSpJIBO0&t=1794s

So I imagine the mods granted the black bar in part on the strength of who posted it. They don't do so lightly and have been known to put a hold on threads in the past to wait for confirmation. They haven't chosen to do so this time and there is likely a compelling reason for that.

(Example of HN waiting for confirmation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17939518 ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889547)

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