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Mathematician John Horton Conway died on Saturday at age 82, reportedly from COVID-19. In “Genius At Play,” @sioroberts’ 2015 biography of Conway, she described him as “somewhere between ‘The Hobbit’s’ Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf.” (Thread) https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-conways-life-in-games-20150828/
Conway’s childlike enthusiasm for games often propelled his work. “Conway beheld a game, such as Go, and saw that it embedded or contained something else entirely, the numbers.”
In a 1960 collaboration with John Selfridge, Conway developed a procedure to divide a cake among three people without envy. The procedure served as a foundation for a 2016 algorithm that can divide a cake fairly among any number of people. https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-algorithm-solves-cake-cutting-problem-20161006/
In 1970, Conway invented the Game of Life, in which a cellular automaton plays out rules of life, death, and survival over a grid. As @sioroberts writes, the game “became a cult classic for those keen on wasting time.”
Conway also discovered the surreal numbers — the largest possible expansion of the number line — while analyzing observations he had made of gameplay.
Conway’s penchant for wordplay is perhaps best seen in the title of a 1979 paper he co-authored with Simon Norton, “Monstrous Moonshine,” which conjectures a deep connection between the monster group and the j-function. https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-chase-moonshine-string-theory-connections-20150312/
When considering the subtle art of conjecture writing, Conway proclaimed that a great conjecture “should be outrageous.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-subtle-art-of-the-mathematical-conjecture-20190507/
On Sunday, in a blog post remembering John Conway, Terence Tao wrote, “Conway was arguably an extreme point in the convex hull of all mathematicians. He will very much be missed.” https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-conway/
For more on John Conway’s work, and for ongoing reporting in mathematics, physics, biology, and computer science, visit http://quantamagazine.org . (/thread)
