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John Conway has died

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Re: John Conway has died

#151

Post by joppy »

intuitionist wrote: post #17
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…

There were better contemporary mathematicians than John Conway, and there were (a handful of) better contemporary popularizers of mathematics, but no one else came close to doing both nearly as well. I met him on a few different occasions when I was very young (middle and high school), and he was always extremely generous with his time, especially with an interlocutor not legally old enough to drink, and clearly bril…

I think one of the interesting things about Conway is that there were better contemporary mathematicians by a contemporary measure of “better”. He just sort of did his thing and worked on problems that he found interesting, not necessarily ones that were considered “important” in the mathematical community at the time. The courage to stick to that is pretty amazing.

Re: John Conway has died

#152

Post by DonHopkins »

ColinWright wrote: post #16
abpavel wrote: post #8

I know he resented to be known for the game of life, because of all the other wonderful works, but it will forever standout in our memories of him because of profound influence it had on us.

> I know he resented to be known for the game of life ... I talked with him about that. There was a period where he got very angry if someone wanted to talk to him about it, because to him it wasn't the most interesting thing, and most people didn't get the point anyway. Later in life he mellowed a bit, and he certainly talked about it with me without rancour.

Life is great, because it's so easy to explain and understand. And it has a story, a metaphor that connects it with humanity, that makes it more interesting and relatable to more people than the pure beautiful mathematics are.

So if John Conway's Life gets you interested in cellular automata, then continue on to the After-Life!

As cellular automata go, Life is just another counting rule (depending just on the count of its neighbors, not their position), which themselves are a very limited subset of all possibilities.

You can make up your own rules, and combine rules together in different ways, and it helps to understand how other rules work, and whether they were "designed" or "discovered".

There are many more wildly different, interesting, and beautiful rules, many even with their own stories and metaphors that help understand them, like how the spirals of BZ reactions are like two-way chemical reactions, slime molds, and reefs of tube worms:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737916

>You also get beautiful spirals from Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions. They can be simulated by cellular automata, and are manifested in nature by chemical reactions, slime molds, and reefs of tube worms!

>I don't think they're Turing complete or self replicating per se, but you can start them on a random configuration, and they will form several spiraling "attractors" around oscillating cores ("nucleation"), that send out concentric spiraling waves, which meet waves from other attractors (or boundaries in the environment like a maze) and reinforce or cancel each other out, and also they can solve mazes and climb gradients and find food! (Plus, slime molds are not only beautiful, but make great pets, and they're easy to care for!)

[more at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737916 ]

Re: John Conway has died

#153

Post by ColinWright »

JdeBP wrote: post #140
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…

It indeed isn't a particularly difficult algorithm. It's just modulo 7 arithmetic and some divisions combined with a table lookup. Martin Gardner of course covered it. I first encountered it in Shakuntala Devi's book Figuring: The Joy of Numbers , which has a slightly different lookup table. With practice, one can run it as the date is being given, a common lightning calculator trick for making things faster, and the…

There are at least two algorithms. The one you outline here feels more like the one I use (and, coincidentally, Art Benjamin[0][1][2] uses), whereas Conway used one of his own devising called the Doomsday Algorithm[3].

So you're right, it's not that hard, but be aware that you may not be thinking of the algorithm Conway used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_T._Benjamin

[1] https://math.hmc.edu/benjamin/

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_a_performance_of_m...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule

Re: John Conway has died

#155

Post by [deleted] »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #87
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…

That’s very imaginative and empathetic to the audience. And of course that’s the lecture you remember 20 yrs layer

[deleted]

Re: John Conway has died

#156

Post by _cs2017_ »

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…

What was the lecture about? I don't suppose there were any recordings?

Re: John Conway has died

#157

Post by swyx »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #156
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…

What was the lecture about? I don't suppose there were any recordings?

>20y ago so the odds are low but not impossible (feynman's lectures are on youtube). just sad to think how many great lectures have been lost to time tho

Re: John Conway has died

#158

Post by mebassett »

I was fortunate enough to attend a maths talk by John Horton Conway about 8 years ago towards the start of my PhD. I was working on things related to the algebraic closure of \F_2, and Conway had a neat observation that all ordinals smaller that \omega^\omega^\omega formed a field that was isomorphic to the closure. So it felt timely.

But what I took from the talk is how casually he'd make references to deep personal life experiences throughout his mathematics. He referenced his divorces, suicide attempts, et cetera. All very casually, like it was no big deal. I was an angsty teenager and continued to be angsty in my early 20s. It helped me realize my issues were no big deal.

RIP John Conway.

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