![]() The Game of Life has a grid of cells in which there are two states: alive and dead. ![]() “He did very serious mathematics, but with a flair and passion that was quite unique.”Ĭonway is most famous in the public eye for his “Game of Life.” He was inspired by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam’s concept of “cellular automata.” “What separated him from other mathematicians whose work was also deep and broad and which extended over many decades was his free-spirited fun-loving and playful approach to everything,” Colm Mulcahy, professor of mathematics at Spelman College, in Atlanta, said in an e-mail. This is what I thought it could be like.” I love that Conway ended up with a wealth of famous insights, games and puzzles because he just followed his own curiosities, and also enjoyed sharing the wonders of math with others. I thought, “This is why I loved math in high school. Reading about Conway’s work and watching recorded lectures and interviews over the past few days, I appreciated that he shared his ideas with such enthusiasm, and in a way that could be broadly understood. We’re not talking about the stereotype of an academic holed up in an office who doesn’t want to be bothered in fact, Conway didn’t even sit in an office at Princeton, but could be found around the math department common room. I didn’t know Conway personally, but as a Princeton student I was aware of him as an eccentric campus celebrity. “ With the passing of John Conway the world of mathematics has lost one of its brightest stars,” Peter Sarnak, professor of mathematics at Princeton University and colleague of Conway’s, said in an e-mail. He inspired generations of students who encountered him anywhere from summer camps to undergraduate and graduate programs, and his inventive games and puzzles delighted the mass readership of Martin Gardner’s Scientific American columns. The legendary professor made many contributions to different areas of mathematics, with influential ideas that spilled over into quantum physics, philosophy and computer science. It’s a fitting description for Conway, who died April 11 at age 82 from complications of COVID-19. This is how mathematician John Horton Conway appears in Donald Knuth’s novella Surreal Numbers-a seemingly all-knowing force that brought all of the numbers into existence, whose methods were written down so others could deduce and explore them, too. "In the beginning, everything was void, and J.H.W.H Conway began to create numbers.”
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