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John Conway has died
121–130 of 194 posts
Re: John Conway has died
#122Numberphile has some great interviews with him, very interesting man... Life, Death, and the Monster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4 Look-and-say Numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea7lJkEhytA
Here's a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoN...
I often rewatch the first video, not just for math, game-of-life, and John Conway, but also ASMR, when he's (spoiler alert) ...
eating the "dead" almonds.
Re: John Conway has died
#123Conway was a legend in the math department. Possibly because he actually lived there -- at one point he got kicked out of his house, and took the office opposite his as a bedroom. A few months later, an artist showed up to paint portraits of famous mathematicians around the border of the ceiling.
Apart from that, the login to his computer required calculating the correct day of week of 10 dates in the last 2000 years. I believe that the record was around 10 seconds. He showed me the algorithm (which isn't actually that hard), but he had a calculating ability that was truly impressive.
He also bet his salary on a series of backgammon games that were played in the common room -- he won, but just barely.
Apart from that, he'd sometimes grab an undergraduate and give them a very brief tutorial on cutting edge mathematics just so he could try to explain a new theorem or paper -- he could be amazingly generous.
On the other hand, he could be astoundingly mercurial -- there was a rumor that he used the stair method for grading, or that the grade was proportional to the length of the answer -- he loved math so much that he couldn't conceive of why anyone cared about their grade in his classes.
Amazingly beloved by everyone who came in contact with him.
Re: John Conway has died
#124People 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…
Speaking of Life, a few years back I ran across a photo of Conway confronting a different form of Life that made me laugh out loud:
Always enjoyed Knuth's book _Surreal Numbers_ on Conway's work. It's a very unusual math tutorial.
Re: John Conway has died
#125Like 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.
The algorithms for simulating Life are more interesting than you might think, even before the advent of GPUs.
Re: John Conway has died
#126Before the dot com crash we made a t-shirt with a tribute to Conway: http://swain.webframe.org/tshirts/conway_life_zoom_tshirt.jp... and I continue to use still life configurations in some of my profiles.
Re: John Conway has died
#127People 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 remember him being kinda bummed about how Game of Life was the thing that made him famous.
I still remember how "Game of Life" blew my mind. I couldn't probably understand the rest of his work. So GoL probably hit in the right spot for moderately smart people.
Re: John Conway has died
#128A great loss. One of my greatest inspriations to train as a mathematician. I'm so sad I never got meet him.
I did get to see one of his lectures in Australia in the 90s. I remember him joking that he has a recurring nightmare that he would meet a man in the street who could draw an icosahedron faster than him. I always hoped that one day I'd get the opportunity to take up that challenge.
Re: John Conway has died
#129The 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?
I agree, this should be verified, Mulcahy (https://twitter.com/CardColm) is wearing a jester hat, it may very well be playing a joke on us all.
Re: John Conway has died
#130Today truly is a doomsday for the old giant. Rest in peace.
Inspired me to write https://github.com/nixpulvis/doomsday FWIW.