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John Conway has died

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Re: John Conway has died

#141

Post by ant8 »

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?

It's been reported in the Guardian newspaper in their live Coronavirus feed. Their source is a tweet by someone by the name of Sam Wang.

This is very sad news. I can still remember typing into my ZX81 the game of life program from a book as a young teenager.

Re: John Conway has died

#142

Post by ant8 »

Very sad news indeed. The Guardian newspaper has reported the death due to coronavirus in their live news feed. Their source is a tweet by a Sam Wang.

I can still remember entering the Game of Life program from a book into my ZX81 when I was a young teenager.

RIP.

Re: John Conway has died

#143

Post by DonHopkins »

sndean wrote: post #10

There were several videos that Numberphile did with Conway, including one where he talked about what problems he'd like to see before he died and his own mortality [0]. In particular he wanted to know why the Monster group [1] exists, what it's about, why it's there [2]. I don't know enough about it to know if progress was made toward that in the past few years since the video was made. [0] https://www.youtube.com/wa…

TIL John Conway's son was once known as "the baby monster", and that Jupiter has a whole lot of elementary particles, but I can't quite grasp the rest of what I just read.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200209/what-is.pdf

>What is... The Monster? By Richard E. Borcherds.

>When I was a graduate student, my supervisor John Conway would bring into the department his one year-old son, who was soon known as the baby monster. A more serious answer to the title question is that the monster is the largest of the (known) sporadic simple groups. Its name comes from its size: The number of elements is 8080, 17424, 79451, 28758, 86459, 90496, 17107, 57005, 75436, 80000, 00000 = 2^46 . 3^20 . 5^9 . 7^6 . 11^2 . 13^3 . 17 . 19 . 23 . 29 . 31 . 41 . 47 . 59 . 71, about equal to the number of elementary particles in the planet Jupiter.

Re: John Conway has died

#144

Post by henearkr »

davidw wrote: post #135
mrwnmonm wrote: post #19

COVID19?

Looks like it https://twitter.com/SamWangPhD/status/1249132655737790464 (I know I'm curious to know that too - but I don't get why we do care... the result is the same?!)

As for me, it deepens more than anything the sense of horror and emergency of this viral threat. One of my scientific idols is dead of it. That helps me, and probably many others, to get even more aware of the need to keep safe.

Re: John Conway has died

#145

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

CraigRo wrote: post #123

Conway 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…

> 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.

I get a bit envious of these stories of American academics actually being able to live in their offices. In my experience in Central Europe, you can stay overnight in your office to work, but sleeping is forbidden, even if you are the head of your department. It is not uncommon for security to patrol the offices every night to ensure that no one is using that nice sofa in their office to get some sleep.

Re: John Conway has died

#147

Post by ivansavz »

Ologn wrote: post #117

Of course, Conway was a serious mathematician who was slightly vexed that the thing he might be most remembered for is what he considered a cast-off game that he dabbled with in the late 1960s. Conway talked about determinism (and free will) from a mathematical and scientific perspective in interviews and lectures. I found what he had to say very interesting - I don't know if he came up with all the ideas he talked a…

Based on your comment, I found these lecture series "The Free Will Lectures - John Conway [2009]" = https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhsb6tmzSpixUGjmJq6g9... and saving to watch later.

Re: John Conway has died

#148

Post by DonHopkins »

To Cellebrate John Conway's Life, I'll repost this description of Rudy Rucker's cellular automata rule "ECOLIBRA", which combines "Brian's Brain" together with "AntiLife" (the 1's-complement of life), so that the void of AntiLife stimulates Brain, and the void of Brain stimulates AntiLife.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438816

>Here's another ecology oriented cellular automata rule called ECOLIBRA, a cross between LIFE, BRAIN (and optionally ANNEAL on the bit plane that determines water/land), from John Walker's and Rudy Rucker's classic CelLab (which Autodesk originally published as a PC application, but John Walker has ported to JavaScript):

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#EcoLiBra

>ECOLIBRA

>This rule is a cross between Life and Brain. The basic idea is that the cells are divided between dark “sea” cells and light “land” cells. We run Brain in the sea, and on land we run not Life but AntiLife. All the land cells are normally firing cells, and the presence of an active AntiLife cell is signaled by having a land cell which is not firing. Full details on EcoLiBra are in the Cellular Automata Theory chapter.

>The name EcoLiBra suggests 1) an ecology of Life and Brain, 2) a balanced situation (equilibrium), and 3) the human intestinal bacteria Escherichia coli, known as E. coli for short. The third connection is perhaps a bit unsavory, but remember that E. coli cells are in fact the favorite “guinea pigs” for present day gene splicing experiments. As one of the goals of CelLab is to promote the development of artificial life, the designer gene connection is entirely appropriate. I've given EcoLiBra a nice, symmetric start pattern, but it also does fine if you use the Bit Plane Editor to randomize all bit planes.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap4.html#EcoLiBra

>The EcoLiBra rule, consisting of Brain and AntiLife, each turned on by the red/black boundary.

>But when the sea runs Brain and the land runs Life, the situation is no longer symmetrical. The pervasive presence of Brain's refractory state makes it less likely for a sea cell to have seven firing neighbors and be turned into a land cell. Unless we change the transition rules, the land will always melt away. So to give land a fighting chance, I now say that a sea cell becomes land if it has seven or six firing neighbors. Also I use better colors: Black, blue, and green for Brain; red and yellow for AntiLife.

Here is a variant I call "ECO" that runs "ANNEAL" on the water/land plane, and (for giggles) a heat diffusion in the upper left-over planes.

https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...

[More discussion and code in the original post...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438816

Re: John Conway has died

#149

Post by baxtr »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #145
CraigRo wrote: post #123

Conway 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…

> 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. I get a bit envious of these stories of American academics actually being able to live in their offices. In my experience in Central Europe, you can stay overnight in your office to work, but sleeping is forbidden, even if you are the head of your department. It is not uncommon for…

When I did my PhD there was another PhD student of Biology who lived for 3-4 months in the lab. That was in Central Europe btw. :) He had to move out of the dorm he lived in and then didn’t want to look for something new since rents were too high for his taste. After the aforementioned months the Prof told him to find somewhere to sleep than the labs cafeteria where we used to have a couch, so he found a new place eventually.
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