
John Conway has died - ColinWright
https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249038195880341505
======
credit_guy
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.

Rest in peace.

~~~
quickthrower2
That’s very imaginative and empathetic to the audience. And of course that’s
the lecture you remember 20 yrs layer

------
gbronner
Conway was a legend in the math department. Possibly because he actually lived
there -- at one point he got kicked out of his house, and took the office
opposite his as a bedroom. A few months later, an artist showed up to paint
portraits of famous mathematicians around the border of the ceiling.

Apart from that, the login to his computer required calculating the correct
day of week of 10 dates in the last 2000 years. I believe that the record was
around 10 seconds. He showed me the algorithm (which isn't actually that
hard), but he had a calculating ability that was truly impressive.

He also bet his salary on a series of backgammon games that were played in the
common room -- he won, but just barely.

Apart from that, he'd sometimes grab an undergraduate and give them a very
brief tutorial on cutting edge mathematics just so he could try to explain a
new theorem or paper -- he could be amazingly generous.

On the other hand, he could be astoundingly mercurial -- there was a rumor
that he used the stair method for grading, or that the grade was proportional
to the length of the answer -- he loved math so much that he couldn't conceive
of why anyone cared about their grade in his classes.

Amazingly beloved by everyone who came in contact with him.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Possibly because he actually lived there -- at one point he got kicked out
> of his house, and took the office opposite his as a bedroom.

I get a bit envious of these stories of American academics actually being able
to live in their offices. In my experience in Central Europe, you can stay
overnight in your office to work, but sleeping is forbidden, even if you are
the head of your department. It is not uncommon for security to patrol the
offices every night to ensure that no one is using that nice sofa in their
office to get some sleep.

~~~
baxtr
When I did my PhD there was another PhD student of Biology who lived for 3-4
months in the lab. That was in Central Europe btw. :) He had to move out of
the dorm he lived in and then didn’t want to look for something new since
rents were too high for his taste. After the aforementioned months the Prof
told him to find somewhere to sleep than the labs cafeteria where we used to
have a couch, so he found a new place eventually.

------
hypersoar
Here's my John Conway story:

I went to Canada/USA Mathcamp in 2009, which fell in the period when he would
come for about a week, giving talks and just hanging out with all us kids. You
might have lunch with him and he'd talk about his "Free Will Theorem", or the
Doomsday Algorithm[1]. He would often play games with us in the afternoon. I
remember seeing him play Phutball[2], a game of his own design, taking heavy
handicaps. One afternoon, he challenged us to 3x3 Dots and Boxes. Each
challenger "won" if they could win a single game against him in a match of 10.
You got to choose each game whether you went first. We played for an hour or
so, a crowd gathered around the piece of paper he was using, everyone offering
suggestions and trying to figure it out. I think the 5th or 6th challenger
finally managed to win.

[1] [http://rudy.ca/doomsday.html](http://rudy.ca/doomsday.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phutball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phutball)

~~~
btilly
I got to be witness to the Dots & Boxes challenge in the mid-90s. He was less
sure, only one of us got to play him.

I later put several hours in and figured out the guaranteed win and why it was
so hard to find. But have since forgotten it.

~~~
sunnydayddr
Numberphile has a good video on it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboGyIilP6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboGyIilP6k)

------
sndean
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.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group)

[2] [https://youtu.be/xOCe5HUObD4?t=409](https://youtu.be/xOCe5HUObD4?t=409)

~~~
DonHopkins
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.

[http://www.ams.org/notices/200209/what-
is.pdf](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.

~~~
QuesnayJr
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.

~~~
posterboy
> These two things are obviously unrelated

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?

------
mathgenius
He visited Australia several times in the 90's and I remember seeing him talk
about wallpaper groups back then. One time he was explaining orbifolds [1] by
folding up a piece of paper, and he somehow made a cone shape, and it somehow
ended up on his head, and then he proceeded to march around like a crazy guy.
It was hilarious.

In 2008 I was living in New York city and Conway gave a series of lectures at
Princeton on quantum physics and the "free will" theorem [2]. I was able to
take the train down to Princeton to see a couple of them, and it was awesome.
He was a bit shaky at first because he had just had a health scare, but he
soon got into the swing of things.

I would highly recommend the biography: "Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of
John Horton Conway" by Siobhan Rob. It is a lot of fun!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold_notation)
[2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-
ph/0604079)

------
ColinWright
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.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-
horton-...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jul/23/john-horton-
conway-the-most-charismatic-mathematician-in-the-world)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_Ways_for_your_Mathemat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winning_Ways_for_your_Mathematical_Plays)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_K._Guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_K._Guy)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwyn_Berlekamp](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

~~~
Insanity
I think many of us have indeed programmed a GoL at some point. I've repeatedly
done that when learning new languages a decade ago.

May he rest in peace

~~~
DennisP
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.

~~~
eru
Have a look at Hashlife (eg via
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife))
to see some exciting ways to compute GoL faster.

~~~
tripzilch
Agreed! The first time I learned about this algorithm, I was pretty mind blown
:)

------
adeledeweylopez
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!

[https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/conway.pdf](https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/conway.pdf)

~~~
whatshisface
Can two different knots have the same integer sequence?

~~~
sdenton4
I'm knot familiar with this one in particular, but a 'unique' knot invariant
would be a very big deal. (It would then be a knot identifier...)

~~~
saagarjha
;)

------
pmoriarty
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.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_chained_arrow_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_chained_arrow_notation)

~~~
slavik81
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.

~~~
eru
You'd get more intuition per experiment ran. But don't underestimate the power
of quantity.

------
DonHopkins
To Cellebrate John Conway's Life, I'll repost this description of Rudy
Rucker's cellular automata rule "ECOLIBRA", which combines "Brian's Brain"
together with "AntiLife" (the 1's-complement of life), so that the void of
AntiLife stimulates Brain, and the void of Brain stimulates AntiLife.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438816)

>Here's another ecology oriented cellular automata rule called ECOLIBRA, a
cross between LIFE, BRAIN (and optionally ANNEAL on the bit plane that
determines water/land), from John Walker's and Rudy Rucker's classic CelLab
(which Autodesk originally published as a PC application, but John Walker has
ported to JavaScript):

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#EcoLiBra](https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#EcoLiBra)

>ECOLIBRA

>This rule is a cross between Life and Brain. The basic idea is that the cells
are divided between dark “sea” cells and light “land” cells. We run Brain in
the sea, and on land we run not Life but AntiLife. All the land cells are
normally firing cells, and the presence of an active AntiLife cell is signaled
by having a land cell which is not firing. Full details on EcoLiBra are in the
Cellular Automata Theory chapter.

>The name EcoLiBra suggests 1) an ecology of Life and Brain, 2) a balanced
situation (equilibrium), and 3) the human intestinal bacteria Escherichia
coli, known as E. coli for short. The third connection is perhaps a bit
unsavory, but remember that E. coli cells are in fact the favorite “guinea
pigs” for present day gene splicing experiments. As one of the goals of CelLab
is to promote the development of artificial life, the designer gene connection
is entirely appropriate. I've given EcoLiBra a nice, symmetric start pattern,
but it also does fine if you use the Bit Plane Editor to randomize all bit
planes.

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap4.html#EcoLiBra](https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap4.html#EcoLiBra)

>The EcoLiBra rule, consisting of Brain and AntiLife, each turned on by the
red/black boundary.

>But when the sea runs Brain and the land runs Life, the situation is no
longer symmetrical. The pervasive presence of Brain's refractory state makes
it less likely for a sea cell to have seven firing neighbors and be turned
into a land cell. Unless we change the transition rules, the land will always
melt away. So to give land a fighting chance, I now say that a sea cell
becomes land if it has seven or six firing neighbors. Also I use better
colors: Black, blue, and green for Brain; red and yellow for AntiLife.

Here is a variant I call "ECO" that runs "ANNEAL" on the water/land plane, and
(for giggles) a heat diffusion in the upper left-over planes.

[https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...](https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L3331)

[More discussion and code in the original post...]

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22438816)

------
jlevers
This is a terrible loss, and seeing the comments here makes me firmly agree
with sentiment I've heard a number of times recently: it would be wonderful if
culturally, it became more typical to tell our teachers/mentors/idols what
they mean to us _before_ they die, instead of saving that outpouring for after
their death.

RIP.

------
hdivider
It appears he died by COVID-19:

[https://dailyvoice.com/new-
jersey/mercer/obituaries/covid-19...](https://dailyvoice.com/new-
jersey/mercer/obituaries/covid-19-kills-renowned-princeton-mathematician-game-
of-life-inventor-john-conway-in-3-days/786461/)

I went through some of his work in detail while in college. While a
mathematician, he clearly had the complexity-compression ability of a top-tier
theoretical physicist. A great loss indeed.

------
mebassett
I was fortunate enough to attend a maths talk by John Horton Conway about 8
years ago towards the start of my PhD. I was working on things related to the
algebraic closure of \F_2, and Conway had a neat observation that all ordinals
smaller that \omega^\omega^\omega formed a field that was isomorphic to the
closure. So it felt timely.

But what I took from the talk is how casually he'd make references to deep
personal life experiences throughout his mathematics. He referenced his
divorces, suicide attempts, et cetera. All very casually, like it was no big
deal. I was an angsty teenager and continued to be angsty in my early 20s. It
helped me realize my issues were no big deal.

RIP John Conway.

------
Enginerrrd
I went to math camp as a kid in middle school. John Conway was one of the
lecturers. He was clearly a brilliant man, slightly eccentric in the way that
most great mathematicians are. But he was humble enough to devote several days
of his time to hangout with a bunch of nerdy kids and teach us about ordinals,
knot theory, and I believe Ramsey numbers. Really nice of him to do that for
what I'm sure was pennies if it paid at all.

------
KingOfCoders
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.

~~~
mark-r
I don't think there's a better example of complex behavior emerging from
simple rules. He was truly a genius.

~~~
KingOfCoders
Yes, that was so mind blowing to me as a kid and still is decades later.

------
hamish_todd
So, this may not actually have happened.

The confusing thing is that, today, John Sharp, also an elderly recreation
mathematician, also died.

Currently the only source is the tweet above. We are not sure whether Colm has
made a mistake. He did know John Horton Conway, but some people are mistaking
his scientific american article, and the later guardian article, for an
obit...

Terrible news if JHC is dead, and also terrible that John Sharp is dead. If
not... will be weird for him waking up tomorrow to let people know that
reports of his death are greatly exaggerated...

~~~
scythe
A valid concern, and sad news, but Colm's latest tweet isn't consistent with
mistaken identity.

[https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249088354857226242?s=20](https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249088354857226242?s=20)

~~~
attrutt
I'm hearing it's a mistake (I'm signing up just to share this, as a former
assistant of his). But what I'm hearing could be wrong as well... in short, I
would await an official press release from Princeton.

------
andybak
I've spent the last year or two obsessed with Conway operators (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_polyhedron_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_polyhedron_notation)
):
[https://github.com/IxxyXR/Polyhydra/](https://github.com/IxxyXR/Polyhydra/)

and I was planning to get in touch just to say hello and ask him a few
geometry questions. If you ever have a thought like that about someone in
their 80s then just do go ahead and do it.

The Game of Life came with the example cassette of software for my first
computer so he's been with me from the beginning of my journey into algorithms
and software.

------
hkmurakami
RIP professor Conway.

Thanks for kicking our butts in Linear Algebra and for all your strange but
endearing quirks, like "if you see a John Conway without a bike around his
neck, that is not the real John Conway" or throwing your shoe at the window to
wake us up in class.

------
tambourine_man
Do we have official confirmation?

Someone on this Twitter thread says it was the coronavirus. Heartbroken.

~~~
agumonkey
Wikipedia page still not updated
[http://archive.is/NieYz](http://archive.is/NieYz)

maybe confusion? let's hope

~~~
vikramkr
Looks like there was an is/was edit war and the page is now locked pending
some sort of confirmation

~~~
howenterprisey
Yup, I locked it pending the outcome of the talk page discussion; it would be
nice to have a non-twitter source to point to.

------
wool_gather
Is there _any_ confirmation of this? It appears absolutely nowhere else on the
web.

~~~
dang
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.

~~~
ColinWright
Mulcahy writes of formal confirmation[0]:

> _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](https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249082939423559680)

[1]
[https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249082390854729730](https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249082390854729730)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/CardColm/status/1249082119567138819](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.

~~~
agumonkey
thanks for the update

------
rgbrgb
Don't see it here, so dropping in one of my fav Conway things... Sprouts[0]. A
pen and paper game that is both fun and full of combinatorially interesting
properties.

What a legend.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouts_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouts_\(game\))

------
idoubtit
When I was 15 years old, I coded a Game of Life (with TurboPascal) and spent
days playing with it, not only by activating cells, but also changing the
automaton rules.

Eight years later, during my PhD, I had to pack discs on Riemannian manifolds
(AKA how to place dictators on a surface so that they are as far as possible
from each other). In the top tier of my bibliography, John Conway was there
again. At first, I couldn't believe it it was the same person.

------
vijayrudraraju
Numberphile has some great interviews with him, very interesting man...

Life, Death, and the Monster:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4)

Look-and-say Numbers:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea7lJkEhytA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea7lJkEhytA)

~~~
omertuchfeld
Here's a playlist:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoN...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoNAHseS-j1y-7V)

~~~
fizixer
I often rewatch the first video, not just for math, game-of-life, and John
Conway, but also ASMR, when he's (spoiler alert) ...

eating the "dead" almonds.

------
systemvoltage
I spent my early programming days in high school build John’s GOL in
Macromedia Flash. This is how I got into programming.

Thank you John for inspiring mankind for many generations to come.

------
at_a_remove
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.

I fire a glider gun into the sky.

~~~
pfdietz
The algorithms for simulating Life are more interesting than you might think,
even before the advent of GPUs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife)

------
layoutIfNeeded
He was a great mathematician.

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...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_polynomial_\(finite_fields\))

------
Ologn
Of course, Conway was a serious mathematician who was slightly vexed that the
thing he might be most remembered for is what he considered a cast-off game
that he dabbled with in the late 1960s.

Conway talked about determinism (and free will) from a mathematical and
scientific perspective in interviews and lectures. I found what he had to say
very interesting - I don't know if he came up with all the ideas he talked
about, but I had certainly never heard of many of them before I heard him talk
about them.

~~~
ivan_ah
Based on your comment, I found these lecture series "The Free Will Lectures -
John Conway [2009]" =
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhsb6tmzSpixUGjmJq6g9...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhsb6tmzSpixUGjmJq6g9iPm73pMWnPnH)
and saving to watch later.

~~~
oblib
>>Conway talked about determinism (and free will)... >>>Based on your comment,
I found these...

The math is over my head but this really piqued my curiosity.

I watched the first video yesterday and am looking forward to going through
them all. He really is quite interesting.

I'm sure I'll take in one of his other lectures afterwards, but I generally
have a hard time following those so maybe these will help ease me into that
some. His opening bit about quantum physics might have of cracked open that
door a little for me.

~~~
qnsi
I was good at physics math in high school and was at a pretty hardcore STEM
highschool, but we never got into quantum physics somehow. I went to economics
studies.

So for me, my worldview pretty much stopped at the whole mechanistic
worldview. Tbh any times I read something philosophical/spiritual mentioning
quantum physics, I was dismissing it as quantum woo.

I also believed in the whole lack of free will thing and was believing it I
guess till very recently. I have to say it made my life a lot worse in
retrospect.

I guess this is one of the toxic memes that take away agency from people.

------
pgreenwood
A great loss. One of my greatest inspriations to train as a mathematician. I'm
so sad I never got meet him.

I did get to see one of his lectures in Australia in the 90s. I remember him
joking that he has a recurring nightmare that he would meet a man in the
street who could draw an icosahedron faster than him. I always hoped that one
day I'd get the opportunity to take up that challenge.

------
abpavel
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.

~~~
ColinWright
> _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.

~~~
DonHopkins
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:

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Zhabo](https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Zhabo)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737916](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737916)
]

------
agentultra
He was my mathematical hero. I never had the opportunity or privilege to be a
student of his but I imagine it must have been extraordinary. I really enjoyed
his books, ONAG, his work on groups and his contributions to the sphere
packing problem. Most of all his playful way of writing and teaching. A true
performer.

I will miss him.

------
kkylin
Confirmation in local news:

[https://dailyvoice.com/new-
jersey/mercer/obituaries/covid-19...](https://dailyvoice.com/new-
jersey/mercer/obituaries/covid-19-kills-renowned-princeton-mathematician-game-
of-life-inventor-john-conway-in-3-days/786461/)

And on Terry Tao's blog:

[https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-
conway/](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-conway/)

And of course on Wikipedia now:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway)

------
QuesnayJr
Jesus, I just realized I was currently reading a paper by Conway. (The paper
is Benson-Conway, "Diagrams for Modular Lattices". I didn't really think about
whether it was that Conway. It's pretty far from his normal research areas.
What a macabre coincidence.

------
skei
I had dinner with John Conway in 2013. I was just leaving Princeton as a
psychic and a mutual friend set it up as my goodbye party.

He was quite extraordinary to speak to. We talked about a whole host of
things, and he signed his book for me. I'm very sorry to hear of his passing.

------
ant8
Very sad news indeed. The Guardian newspaper has reported the death due to
coronavirus in their live news feed. Their source is a tweet by a Sam Wang.

I can still remember entering the Game of Life program from a book into my
ZX81 when I was a young teenager.

RIP.

------
hirundo
There's thin black banner at the top of HN at the moment. Is that in honor of
John Conway?

~~~
saagarjha
Yes.

------
ivan_ah
> Rumor has it that extensive interactions with a host of mathematical
> luminaries are covered, [...] and the French didactic auteur Nicolas
> Bourbaki.

Wait, I though Bourbaki was a collaborative (a group of people), not an actual
person:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki)

~~~
tprice7
That article was published on April Fool's day.

------
wslh
Before the dot com crash we made a t-shirt with a tribute to Conway:
[http://swain.webframe.org/tshirts/conway_life_zoom_tshirt.jp...](http://swain.webframe.org/tshirts/conway_life_zoom_tshirt.jpg)
and I continue to use still life configurations in some of my profiles.

------
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
I did t meet Conway, nor see him lecture, nor am I a mathematician. When I was
young I read about the Conway Game of Life and it sparked a long fascination
with alife. I spent a lot of time on a old laptop, playing about with dot,
ants, rules, genetic algorithms, mostly in qbasic. Good times.

------
amasad
This compelled me to write a quick Game of Life implementation. This is nearly
40 Lines of Code in Classic BASIC [https://repl.it/@amasad/conways-game-of-
life](https://repl.it/@amasad/conways-game-of-life)

RIP John Conway.

------
schoen
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.

------
jayturley
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.

~~~
rzach
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.

------
hoten
Sad to hear this. This motivated me to dig up some old code, perhaps someone
here will appreciate it. Maybe you can find a new rule set to Conway's Game of
Life that produces undiscovered patterns.

[1] [https://hoten.cc/blog/life/](https://hoten.cc/blog/life/)

[2] [https://connorjclark.github.io/dart-
life/#life](https://connorjclark.github.io/dart-life/#life)

~~~
masswerk
Here's my _in memoriam_ exercise in BASIC for the PET 2001 (running in
emulation):
[https://www.masswerk.at/pet/?run=life.txt](https://www.masswerk.at/pet/?run=life.txt)

------
bcurfs
Another famous J.C. - but one that brought more joy to my life with his
Winning Ways than the other one did. Rest in peace, John. --
[https://www.quora.com/profile/Bruno-
Curfs](https://www.quora.com/profile/Bruno-Curfs)

------
joeraut
I first discovered Game of Life during high school, and it got me fascinated
about different cellular automata and writing software implementations of
them.

RIP John Conway.

------
womd
RIP John! here a small tribute i created while thinking of you! Was inspired
by the idea of your game of life but modded for corona specific use ... note:
this is just a game.....

[https://jsfiddle.net/womd/97esjtfd/](https://jsfiddle.net/womd/97esjtfd/)

------
User23
On Numbers and Games is one of the most entertaining mathematical books I've
ever read. We've lost a genius in the true sense of the word.

------
tombert
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.

RIP John.

------
PerilousD
The twitter account oogle search doesnt back this up - this may be true but in
this day and age WTF people why is this number one?

~~~
csa
I imagine that there are many reasons.

That said, please note how the YC name and Conway are related. At a minimum,
this might provide some insight.

~~~
ColinWright
You might be thinking of a different Conway ... John Horton Conway has no
association with Y-Combinator that I know of.

I'd be happy to learn otherwise.

------
mrwnmonm
COVID19?

~~~
diegoperini
The thread on Twitter says yes but I'm not sure that's a reliable source.

~~~
howenterprisey
Yeah, does anyone have a news source for this besides the one twitter thread?
Wikipedia wants to know.

~~~
ColinWright
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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
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).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNKFSpJIBO0&t=1794s](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=17939518)
;
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889547))

------
jnswift
My UG students and I played the Game of Life in class during Week 7 this
spring semester....that was about 5 weeks ago. We have played it for so many
years during the ABM lecture...I never had the good fortune to meet him, but
many years of students know who he is and of his accomplishments..:)

Stay safe, all.

------
ithkuil
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACperhaps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACperhaps)
a lesser known contribution

~~~
raphlinus
Very likely you meant
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN).
Agree this is a clever beast.

------
jnswift
We have played the game of life in my UG class for years during the ABM
lecture....the last time was about 5 weeks ago. The students always loved
it....:(

------
peter303
Game of Life was the first computer program I wrote exactly 50 years while in
high school. It was in Dartmouth BASIC on a teletype to PDP 8(?) at some local
college.

~~~
Gibbon1
I remember 50 years ago my dad worked for TRW. He got a call after dinner. And
for some reason took me with him to work. I know now that his NASTRAN job had
died. But as a 7 year old had no idea.

I just remember walking in to the deserted windowless TRW building and my dad
flipping on the IBM vector display, running a batch of cards and suddenly the
Game of Life on the display. I was mesmerized.

------
dghughes
I bought John Conway's Game of Life book that came with a 5 1/4 floppy before
I even had a computer.

------
calhoun137
May he rest in peace, and may his place be among the great mathematicians of
all time

------
anta40
RIP John Conway.

I think my interest on digital organism sparked by his famous Game of Life.

------
madprops
196883

------
soheil
The mathematical world has truly lost a legend to the game of life.

------
emilengler
And another person with the Erdős-Number 1 passed away :(

------
sytelus
Game of life, ended by COVID-19. Wow.

------
nixpulvis
Today truly is a doomsday for the old giant.

Rest in peace.

~~~
nixpulvis
Inspired me to write
[https://github.com/nixpulvis/doomsday](https://github.com/nixpulvis/doomsday)
FWIW.

------
foobarbazetc
May his memory be a blessing.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
So sad to see Conway’s Game of Life come to an end.

~~~
potiuper
Bad definition of life, which has a beginning and an end unlike a Turing
machine, by von Neumann.

------
pcc09
Rest in peace.

------
nullc
XX

XX

------
lihaciudaniel
RIP Conway

------
PerilousD
The twitter account doesn't back this up with a source - the OP here doesn't
back this up this up with a source - my quick Google search doen't back this
up, this may be true, but in this day and age WTF people? why is this number
one without any verification?

~~~
gorgoiler
It’s a little meta given we’re on HN, but I’d trust ColinWright FWIW.

------
keithflower
Worthy of HN border acknowledgment, please.

~~~
zamadatix
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors)
that I'm not even sure how to find other than I saw someone else mention it
once.

~~~
ColinWright
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.

There are clues ...

------
teddyh
Reportedly it was due to COVID-19. Obviously, then, he must have had too many
close neighbors. Four or more, to be precise.

------
brianzelip
Interesting that, at the time of commenting, his Wikipedia page hasn't been
updated with his death yet.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway)

Peace, and rest.

~~~
brianzelip
Never mind! It's not that interesting, what with the announcements at the top
of the page explaining why the page is locked for editing.

------
personjerry
Wow, I didn't realize he was still alive

------
jonbaer
RIP. HN black bar +1 ...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eAmxgINXrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eAmxgINXrE)

------
chmaynard
"One of the most unique mathematicians and human beings who ever lived."

This statement makes no sense and seems like a rather shallow, facile eulogy
for such a complex person.

~~~
chmaynard
This eulogy makes more sense and rings true:

"Conway was arguably an extreme point in the convex hull of all
mathematicians. He will very much be missed." \- Terence Tao

Source: [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-
conway/](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-conway/)

------
mister_hn
The game of life has catched on him

------
antonzabirko
Coronavirus death

------
lainwashere
Good night, sweet prince

------
jdkee
Oh no. Rest in peace John.

