181–190 of 194 posts
"One of the most unique mathematicians and human beings who ever lived." This statement makes no sense and seems like a rather shallow, facile eulogy for such a complex person.
"Conway was arguably an extreme point in the convex hull of all mathematicians. He will very much be missed." - Terence Tao
Source: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-conway/
Here's my John Conway story: I went to Canada/USA Mathcamp in 2009, which fell in the period when he would come for about a week, giving talks and just hanging out with all us kids. You might have lunch with him and he'd talk about his "Free Will Theorem", or the Doomsday Algorithm[1]. He would often play games with us in the afternoon. I remember seeing him play Phutball[2], a game of his own design, taking heavy ha…
I got to be witness to the Dots & Boxes challenge in the mid-90s. He was less sure, only one of us got to play him. I later put several hours in and figured out the guaranteed win and why it was so hard to find. But have since forgotten it.
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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.
>>Conway talked about determinism (and free will)... >>>Based on your comment, I found these... The math is over my head but this really piqued my curiosity. I watched the first video yesterday and am looking forward to going through them all. He really is quite interesting. I'm sure I'll take in one of his other lectures afterwards, but I generally have a hard time following those so maybe these will help ease me in…
So for me, my worldview pretty much stopped at the whole mechanistic worldview. Tbh any times I read something philosophical/spiritual mentioning quantum physics, I was dismissing it as quantum woo.
I also believed in the whole lack of free will thing and was believing it I guess till very recently. I have to say it made my life a lot worse in retrospect.
I guess this is one of the toxic memes that take away agency from people.
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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.…
That article is aimed at mathematicians. A high level summary is that there are two completely unrelated things, the Monster group and modular forms. (Groups are sets of symmetries. Modular functions are special functions of complex numbers. The related topic of modular forms come up in the proof of Fermat's last theorem.) These two things are obviously unrelated, so when someone spotted a numerical coincidence in so…
Skimming just quickly gives a different impression.
> It was clear to many people that this was just a mean- ingless coincidence; after all, if you have enough large integers from various areas of mathematics, then a few are going to be close just by chance, and John McKay was told that his observation was about as useful as looking at tea leaves. John Thompson took McKay’s observation further and ...
what follows is nothing to scoff at.
Finally, Borcherd's article concludes (2002, that was linked above):
> So the question “What is the monster?” now has several reasonable answers:
> ...
> It is a group of diagram automorphisms of the monster Lie algebra. Unfortunately none of these definitions is completely satisfactory. At the moment all con- structions of the algebraic structures above seem artificial; they are constructed as sums of two or more apparently unrelated spaces, and it takes a lot of effort to define the algebraic structure on the sum of these spaces and to check that the monster acts on the resulting structure. It is still an open problem to find a really simple and natural construction of the monster vertex algebra.
Which means, showing a natural relation should be outstanding?
Stay safe, all.
I think my interest on digital organism sparked by his famous Game of Life.
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 te…
https://math.unm.edu/news-events/news/famous-british-mathema...
https://dailyvoice.com/new-jersey/mercer/obituaries/covid-19...
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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 touch…
Have a look at Hashlife (eg via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife ) to see some exciting ways to compute GoL faster.