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John Conway has died

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Re: John Conway has died

#101

Post by Gibbon1 »

peter303 wrote: post #60

Game of Life was the first computer program I wrote exactly 50 years while in high school. It was in Dartmouth BASIC on a teletype to PDP 8(?) at some local college.

I remember 50 years ago my dad worked for TRW. He got a call after dinner. And for some reason took me with him to work. I know now that his NASTRAN job had died. But as a 7 year old had no idea.

I just remember walking in to the deserted windowless TRW building and my dad flipping on the IBM vector display, running a batch of cards and suddenly the Game of Life on the display. I was mesmerized.

Re: John Conway has died

#102

Post by rjtobin »

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…

And sadly all three authors of "Winning Ways" have now passed away within almost exactly a year: Berlekamp died on Apr 9 last year, and Richard Guy died in March (he was 103!).

Re: John Conway has died

#103

Post by segfaultbuserr »

PerilousD wrote: post #73

The twitter account doesn't back this up with a source - the OP here doesn't back this up this up with a source - my quick Google search doen't back this up, this may be true, but in this day and age WTF people? why is this number one without any verification?

Yes, the source is not citable by Wikipedia's standard, but it appears that Mulcahy is considered an established personality in the recreational mathematics community, and his source was private communication from the close associates of John Conway, which by itself is backed up by Colin Wright, an established personality on Hacker News. [0][1] So it's certain to say the information is true.

By the way, I once said that Twitter is now the center of gravity of the web these days, and someone didn't believe me and argued against it with some user statistics, which missed the point. This is another example on how Twitter is the center of gravity, it is, in the sense of its network effect - that it has a group of active and influential people, which makes it the place where the latest news and rumors break out. Not different from the early blogosphere, the Usenet, or even Hacker News posts about Silicon Valley.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843577

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844444

Re: John Conway has died

#104

Post by wool_gather »

dang wrote: post #78
wool_gather wrote: post #24

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

I trust Colin's explanation of the source. It would be awful to have fed a mistake, but wonderful if the news turned out not to be true. People are posting such good comments about Conway that I wouldn't want to bury the thread. Best case scenario, we change the title to "John Conway has not died" and continue to celebrate him.

Fair enough :)

Re: John Conway has died

#105

Post by [deleted] »

credit_guy wrote: post #34

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: John Conway has died

#106

Post by hamish_todd »

So, this may not actually have happened.

The confusing thing is that, today, John Sharp, also an elderly recreation mathematician, also died.

Currently the only source is the tweet above. We are not sure whether Colm has made a mistake. He did know John Horton Conway, but some people are mistaking his scientific american article, and the later guardian article, for an obit...

Terrible news if JHC is dead, and also terrible that John Sharp is dead. If not... will be weird for him waking up tomorrow to let people know that reports of his death are greatly exaggerated...

Re: John Conway has died

#107

Post by segfaultbuserr »

agumonkey wrote: post #62
tambourine_man wrote: post #27

Do we have official confirmation? Someone on this Twitter thread says it was the coronavirus. Heartbroken.

Wikipedia page still not updated http://archive.is/NieYz maybe confusion? let's hope

Wikipedia is not the place for "truth", it's only an extremely useful machine that summarizes information from secondary sources. It can only repeat information from trusted, secondary sources (there are exceptions to primary sources, but only when the source is universally considered trusted, which is not the case here). Even if the information is true, if it's not published by a trusted secondary source elsewhere, it cannot claim that. Similarly, the claims by Wikipedia cannot be cited as reliable information, but the sources of the claims can.

So Wikipedia, by its policies, cannot be updated until there's sufficient press coverage (Although verification != press coverage, and there are legitimate criticisms that say verification on Wikipedia via popular press coverage is often given an undue weight, on the other hand reliable professional literature is undercited, which can compromise Wikipedia's integrity, but it's another story). It's frustrating that many people fail to grasp how Wikipedia works.

Re: John Conway has died

#109

Post by DennisP »

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

It was my first program in Turbo Pascal. Until then I'd been a BASICA programmer and opposed to "structured programming," which I thought would stifle my creativity. I'd spend long days with code printouts all over the floor, tracing through GOTOs to find my bugs.

Then dad brought home Turbo and I tried it out with the GoL. It worked correctly the first time it ran. That had never happened to me before. I never touched BASICA again.

Sad to see Conway go. He was born the same year as my dad, who died several months ago.

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