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Sad he did not live to see it due to Covid.
I could not find any definition for “omniperiodic”.
In Conway's Game of Life, there exist "periodic" patterns for all n>0 such that the n-th pattern has n distinct states which repeat in a loop.

A jargon-heavy history of the problem: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Omniperiodic

How are these new periodic functions p19 and p41 different from those that came before. It seems like there many other previous cases of Omniperiodicity.

Edit: ok so it seems they had solved for certain periods above some numbers but not for all periods - this month saw the last two being found.

The link has more https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Oscillator

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So how exactly does finding a 41p state prove omniperiodicity?
It was already known that periods of all other lengths were possible. 41 was the last remaining length that wasn't known to be possible.