John Conway

John Conway

A math giant passed away, John Conway, a guy who was a natural in his craft like the Babe was in baseball. He just had the chops to make things happen in ways that astounded his peers to no end.

“Once he shook my hand and informed me that I was four handshakes away from Napoleon, the chain being: [me] — John Conway — Bertrand Russell — Lord John Russell – Napoleon,” said his Princeton University colleague David Gabai over email. Then there was the time Conway and one of his closest friends at Princeton, the mathematician Simon Kochen, decided to memorize the world capitals on a whim. “We decided to drop the mathematics for a while,” Kochen said, “and for a few weeks we’d go home and do, like, the western bulge of Africa or the Caribbean nations.”

Conway had the tendency — perhaps unparalleled among his peers — of jumping into an area of mathematics and completely changing it.

“A lot of the objects he studied are thought of by other mathematicians the way that he thought of them,” Miller said. “It’s as if his personality has been superimposed on them.”

It gets better ...

In the 19th century, a trio of British and American scientists — Thomas Kirkman, Charles Little and Peter Tait — labored to create a kind of periodic table of knots. Over the course of six years they classified the first 54 knots.

Conway, in a 1970 paper, came up with a more efficient way of doing the same job. His description — known as Conway notation — made it much easier to diagram the tangles and overlaps in a knot.

“What Little did in six years, it took him an afternoon,” said Marc Lackenby, a mathematician at the University of Oxford who studies knot theory.

In his spare time, he created the Game of Life ...

The rules:

For a space that is 'populated':

• Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by solitude.
• Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.

For a space that is 'empty' or 'unpopulated'

• Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

The Game  :)

Why GOL is REALLY SIGNIFICANT.

Amazingly, life is a universal cellular automaton, in the sense that it is effectively capable of emulating any cellular automaton, Turing machine, or any other system that can be translated into a system known to be universal. 

RIP