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 Guy[3] and Elwyn Berlekamp[4]. My copy signed by all three is something I treasure.
I was privileged to know all three of them, and I mourn their passing.
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.
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 brilliant in person. One example of his generosity was his collaboration on a book about triangle centers[0] with the late Steve Sigur, who was not a research mathematician but a high school teacher.
Of course the Game of Life is an enduring classic, but I’ll also always have fond memories of Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays and Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups (affectionately known as SPLAG). The mathematical world has truly lost a living legend.
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.
Oh, I absolutely love the surreal numbers! The surreals are a superset of the reals, but that's not why I think they are interesting.
In mainstream pure mathematics, you first create the naturals (whole numbers). Then from there you create the rationals, as fractions of naturals. Then from there you can create the reals as infinite sequences of rationals.
This works, but it is arguably inelegant. We like to say naturals are a subset of rationals, and rationals are a subset of reals. But by this construction they're not ontologically the same. (We can of course find a subset of the reals that look like the rationals, etc., but they aren't identical, only equivalent.)
In contrast, the surreal numbers are all constructed in one go. Very elegant.
That article in The Guardian is especially good. The author clearly loves mathematics and knows how to tell a good story.
> Conway’s is a jocund and playful egomania, sweetened by self-deprecating charm. He has on many occasions admitted: “I do have a big ego! As I often say, modesty is my only vice. If I weren’t so modest, I’d be perfect.”
Such a long list even without mentioning: FRACTRAN, Conway's soldiers, the angel problem, the Conway base 13 function, the 15 theorem (and 290 theorem)… incredible how he got so many mind-bending and unique ideas.
On Conway the showman: I heard the following from my friend who went to Princeton for his PhD. First day of class, Conway walks in, after some introduction, picks up a piece of chalk with his left-hand, starts at the left-hand corner of the blackboard writing quickly and neatly. Everyone thinks "Ah, he must be left-handed". When he's filled half the blackboard he smoothly switches the chalk to his right hand and continues writing just as quickly and neatly.
He told me many such anecdotes about Conway dazzling everyone; all the students were in awe of him. One of them is mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Doomsday rule: “Conway can usually give the correct answer [the day of the week for any year/month/date] in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practices his calendrical calculations on his computer, which is programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logs on.”
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.
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!).
How sad :-( Game of life was one of the first things I've coded in the early 80s I was really proud of as a kid (highly optimized Z80 maschine code to make it as fast as possible per frame).
I was hugely inspired by the concept, especially by gliders. I thought Conway to be a Genius. He might have gone but the Game of Life and the inspiration it brings will always be with us.
I had always wondered about that. Is there a full collection of info about this site? There always seem to be random things like a black bar without even a comment in code or a page like https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors that I'm not even sure how to find other than I saw someone else mention it once.
Treat the site a little like a text adventure, akin to Colossal Cave Adventure or other text-based interactive fiction. HN is a world to explore, with items to uncover and treasures to discover.
I’m experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, because a few hours ago I was reading about Conway polynomials:
“While there is a unique finite field of order p^n up to isomorphism, the representation of the field elements depends on the choice of the irreducible polynomial. The Conway polynomial is a way of standardizing this choice.”
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:
>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!)
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.
The Monster group is fascinating because we know it exists without quite knowing why it exists. There's a pattern that we can sense but it still escapes our understanding. There's just enough structure that you can imagine future generations someday saying, "Of course, of course."
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.
>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.
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 some numbers that show up in each, people scoffed. (Conway is the one that nicknamed it "moonshine".)
It turns out it's completely true, and the proof uses a bunch of mathematical techniques that were developed when studying string theory for physics. The whole thing is an incredibly unlikely story.
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?
It's an introduction to Monstrous Moonshine, an unexpected connection between the monster group M and modular functions, with applications in theoretical physics, see Wikipedia [0] for a summary.
I have fond memories of going through reams of graph paper, manually simulating Conway's Game of Life.
This was my first exposure to cellular automata, and I loved to follow the evolution of gliders and other emergent phenomena. This was before the days that personal computer programs existed to do the simulation for you. It's so much more satisfying to do it by hand.
Later, I was fascinated by Conway's chained arrow notation[1], which is used to concisely represent unimaginably gigantic numbers.
Richard Guy, the discoverer of the glider in Conway's Game of Life, also passed away last month.
In 2017, Richard gave a talk for the 50th Anniversary of the University of Calgary (and his 100th birthday). Much of it was recounting stories of his past in response to questions from the audience. When asked about the glider, he told us how Conway came up with the Game of Life and invited a number of colleagues to help investigate its implications. They spent the next few days just simulating the Game of Life by hand on graph paper. Richard happened to come across it from one of his initial conditions.
Today you could discover the glider in minutes by playing with an interactive simulation. It's interesting how much more effort it used to be. I suppose, though, that you'd build better intuition and understanding doing it by hand.
This is worthy of a black bar. John Conway was a legend.
I know that he was annoyed by the association with the game of life, but I still have to credit it with my fascination with cellular automata. For the past ten years, I have used GOL as my “Hello World” for learning a new language.
Colm is extremely well-connected in recreational mathematical circles. He's on the board of the G4G committee, and is an active mathematician and populariser of mathematics. It was he who first broke the news of Richard Guy's passing.
Anything he says is reliable, but by all means wait for other confirmation.
WRT wikipedia, I have a story about the Richard Guy page, but that's not a story for here. Another time.
HN now gets about 5 million visitors a month. In case it needs to be said for some of those folks, the OP -- ColinWright -- is also rather well connected from what I gather and part of that circle (of recreational mathematics, etc).
So I imagine the mods granted the black bar in part on the strength of who posted it. They don't do so lightly and have been known to put a hold on threads in the past to wait for confirmation. They haven't chosen to do so this time and there is likely a compelling reason for that.
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.
The Game of Life is responsible for getting me into computing back in the early 80s. Spent a summer implementing classifier systems at VA Tech in the 90s and never had so much fun. A great mind that will be greatly missed.
Cellular Automata got me into computing a few years ago - it's amazing how the Game of Life and other CA's are Turing Complete.
So many people will miss him.
The Princeton Department of Mathematics page doesn't seem to have anything about his passing.
Edit: Of course it's the weekend; I should have realized that there will probably not be anything on that page before Monday.
It's Easter weekend, there probably wouldn't be anything before Tuesday.
I've commented elsewhere[0] on the connectedness and reliability of Colm, but people can always wait for confirmation via other sources before they choose to believe it.
Yes, I wouldn't necessarily expect the web site to be updated immediately, but I would think there would be a tweet from https://twitter.com/princeton sometime today at least.
Mulcahy is a pretty reliable source, and that's definitely his twitter. In lieu of official confirmation, for the time being it seems like this is about as reliable as anybody could hope for.
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.
I've now had it confirmed in personal correspondence, but before it can be announced officially it needs to go through the Dean's Office, and it's a Holiday Weekend, so that won't be quick.
It's reasonable for people to be sceptical, I don't have a problem with that.
As a teen, I was obsessed with knot theory, and Conway's knot notation always felt like magic to me.
The notation works by counting the number of twists in a segment, and then looking for another twist directly connected to the previous twist, and so on.
This gives you a sequence of integers, one counting the number (and direction) of twists.
If the entire knot is made of twists connected this way, then the continued fraction you get from the sequence of numbers is a knot invariant!
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.
The April Fool's piece from a few years ago mentions that there is a biography, which was published as "Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway" by Siobhan Roberts. I'm sure that would be a good read.
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 embarrassing. "Hm, I wanted to give a talk about this, but since we found this mistakes, I'm not sure what to say for the remaining 50 minutes". Ok, he said, let's take a step back and start again. And he started again, and the talk was amazing. The whole "embarrassing" thing had been staged. He played a bit of misdirection on us. He started with something that seemed quite trivial, pretended to make a mistake, then showed us how much deeper the topic was.
This was not the only math talk I've seen that was actually a performance, but it was the best.
>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
Only a tiny handful. Feynman gave a guest lecture at our physics class at Caltech in the 70's on potato chip worlds. As far as I know, it only persists in my memory.
I sometimes wonder why I didn't buy a cheap cassette recorder and record a bunch of lectures from then. Probably because nobody else did, either.
Like 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.
193 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadSome 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 Guy[3] and Elwyn Berlekamp[4]. My copy signed by all three is something I treasure.
I was privileged to know all three of them, and I mourn their passing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_Ways_for_your_Mathemat...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_K._Guy
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp
Added in Edit:
From his wikipedia page:
Known for: Surreal numbers, Conway groups, Monstrous moonshine, Doomsday algorithm, Look-and-say sequence, Icosians, Mathieu groupoid, Free will theorem, Conway chained arrow notation, Conway criterion, Conway notation (knot theory), Conway polyhedron notation, ATLAS of Finite Groups, Conway's Game of Life
May he rest in peace
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.
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 brilliant in person. One example of his generosity was his collaboration on a book about triangle centers[0] with the late Steve Sigur, who was not a research mathematician but a high school teacher.
Of course the Game of Life is an enduring classic, but I’ll also always have fond memories of Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays and Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups (affectionately known as SPLAG). The mathematical world has truly lost a living legend.
[0] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Triangle_Book.html?...
In mainstream pure mathematics, you first create the naturals (whole numbers). Then from there you create the rationals, as fractions of naturals. Then from there you can create the reals as infinite sequences of rationals.
This works, but it is arguably inelegant. We like to say naturals are a subset of rationals, and rationals are a subset of reals. But by this construction they're not ontologically the same. (We can of course find a subset of the reals that look like the rationals, etc., but they aren't identical, only equivalent.)
In contrast, the surreal numbers are all constructed in one go. Very elegant.
> Conway’s is a jocund and playful egomania, sweetened by self-deprecating charm. He has on many occasions admitted: “I do have a big ego! As I often say, modesty is my only vice. If I weren’t so modest, I’d be perfect.”
On Conway the showman: I heard the following from my friend who went to Princeton for his PhD. First day of class, Conway walks in, after some introduction, picks up a piece of chalk with his left-hand, starts at the left-hand corner of the blackboard writing quickly and neatly. Everyone thinks "Ah, he must be left-handed". When he's filled half the blackboard he smoothly switches the chalk to his right hand and continues writing just as quickly and neatly.
He told me many such anecdotes about Conway dazzling everyone; all the students were in awe of him. One of them is mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Doomsday rule: “Conway can usually give the correct answer [the day of the week for any year/month/date] in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practices his calendrical calculations on his computer, which is programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logs on.”
[1]: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/06/27/conways-prime-prod... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Soldiers
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_problem
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_base_13_function
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_and_290_theorems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843487
https://imgur.com/a/L4JGQN6
Always enjoyed Knuth's book _Surreal Numbers_ on Conway's work. It's a very unusual math tutorial.
Thank you John for inspiring mankind for many generations to come.
I was hugely inspired by the concept, especially by gliders. I thought Conway to be a Genius. He might have gone but the Game of Life and the inspiration it brings will always be with us.
EDIT: I typo’d the email address but we got a black bar so.
Black bar = honoring the dead.
/topcolors = list of colors that people have set their top bar to be.
There are clues ...
I’m experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, because a few hours ago I was reading about Conway polynomials:
“While there is a unique finite field of order p^n up to isomorphism, the representation of the field elements depends on the choice of the irreducible polynomial. The Conway polynomial is a way of standardizing this choice.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_polynomial_(finite_fi...
Life, Death, and the Monster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4
Look-and-say Numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea7lJkEhytA
eating the "dead" almonds.
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.
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 ]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group
[2] https://youtu.be/xOCe5HUObD4?t=409
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.
It turns out it's completely true, and the proof uses a bunch of mathematical techniques that were developed when studying string theory for physics. The whole thing is an incredibly unlikely story.
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine
This was my first exposure to cellular automata, and I loved to follow the evolution of gliders and other emergent phenomena. This was before the days that personal computer programs existed to do the simulation for you. It's so much more satisfying to do it by hand.
Later, I was fascinated by Conway's chained arrow notation[1], which is used to concisely represent unimaginably gigantic numbers.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_chained_arrow_notation
In 2017, Richard gave a talk for the 50th Anniversary of the University of Calgary (and his 100th birthday). Much of it was recounting stories of his past in response to questions from the audience. When asked about the glider, he told us how Conway came up with the Game of Life and invited a number of colleagues to help investigate its implications. They spent the next few days just simulating the Game of Life by hand on graph paper. Richard happened to come across it from one of his initial conditions.
Today you could discover the glider in minutes by playing with an interactive simulation. It's interesting how much more effort it used to be. I suppose, though, that you'd build better intuition and understanding doing it by hand.
I know that he was annoyed by the association with the game of life, but I still have to credit it with my fascination with cellular automata. For the past ten years, I have used GOL as my “Hello World” for learning a new language.
RIP John.
Anything he says is reliable, but by all means wait for other confirmation.
WRT wikipedia, I have a story about the Richard Guy page, but that's not a story for here. Another time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNKFSpJIBO0&t=1794s
So I imagine the mods granted the black bar in part on the strength of who posted it. They don't do so lightly and have been known to put a hold on threads in the past to wait for confirmation. They haven't chosen to do so this time and there is likely a compelling reason for that.
(Example of HN waiting for confirmation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17939518 ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889547)
https://twitter.com/Mathematical_A/status/124905768857257164...
(I know I'm curious to know that too - but I don't get why we do care... the result is the same?!)
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/82-heritage/13614-john-co...
https://www.math.princeton.edu/people/john-conway
I've commented elsewhere[0] on the connectedness and reliability of Colm, but people can always wait for confirmation via other sources before they choose to believe it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843577
Best case scenario, we change the title to "John Conway has not died" and continue to celebrate him.
> Not yet. Three of the people who told me heard it from his ex wife Diana. Two knew it was imminent since he fell ill on Wednesday.
Also[1]:
> More emails from insiders are arriving regularly. One from a student of his. Etc.
And[2]:
> From 5 of his close associates ...
[0] https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249082939423559680
[1] https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249082390854729730
[2] https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249082119567138819
================================= =================================
Added in edit:
I've now had it confirmed in personal correspondence, but before it can be announced officially it needs to go through the Dean's Office, and it's a Holiday Weekend, so that won't be quick.
It's reasonable for people to be sceptical, I don't have a problem with that.
The notation works by counting the number of twists in a segment, and then looking for another twist directly connected to the previous twist, and so on.
This gives you a sequence of integers, one counting the number (and direction) of twists.
If the entire knot is made of twists connected this way, then the continued fraction you get from the sequence of numbers is a knot invariant!
https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/conway.pdf
As for uniqueness, even "rational knots," the ones from the simplest of the fundamental polyhedra, have multiple fractions representing them.
Someone on this Twitter thread says it was the coronavirus. Heartbroken.
maybe confusion? let's hope
probably, duckduckgo preview even showed "John Conway war a British" a few seconds ago. Aptly typoed
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844444
This was not the only math talk I've seen that was actually a performance, but it was the best.
Rest in peace.
Only a tiny handful. Feynman gave a guest lecture at our physics class at Caltech in the 70's on potato chip worlds. As far as I know, it only persists in my memory.
I sometimes wonder why I didn't buy a cheap cassette recorder and record a bunch of lectures from then. Probably because nobody else did, either.
Pun perhaps not intended, but good.
I don't remember what it was about (maybe Catalan numbers?), but ten years later, I wish I'd been able to recall more.
Rest in peace.
I fire a glider gun into the sky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife