Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’ve been waiting on John Horton Conway: while I’ve seen tributes on Twitter and elsewhere (this one from XKCD is nice), there wasn’t anything I considered reliable until Princeton published their obit this morning.

“John Conway was an amazing mathematician, game wizard, polymath and storyteller who left an indelible mark on everyone he encountered — colleagues, students and beyond — inspiring the popular imagination just as he unraveled some of the deepest mathematical mysteries,” said Igor Rodnianski, professor of mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematics. “His childlike curiosity was perfectly complemented by his scientific originality and the depth of his thinking. It is a great loss for us and for the entire mathematical world.”
Over his long career, Conway made significant contributions to mathematics in the fields of group theory, number theory, algebra, geometric topology, theoretical physics, combinatorial game theory and geometry.

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One of Conway’s most well-known accomplishments was the Game of Life, which he conceived in the 1970s to describe how life can evolve from an initial state. The concept builds on ideas that trace back to John von Neumann, a pioneer of early computing, in the 1940s. Conway’s game involves a two-dimensional grid in which each square cell interacts with its neighbors according to a set of rules. Over time, these simple interactions give rise to complexity.
The game was introduced in an October 1970 issue of Scientific American’s mathematical games column, whose creator, the late Martin Gardner, was friends with Conway. Conway continued his interest in “recreational mathematics” by inventing numerous games and puzzles. At Princeton, he often carried in his pockets props such as ropes, pennies, cards, dice, models and sometimes a Slinky to intrigue and entertain students and others.

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The achievement for which Conway himself was most proud, according to [Simon] Kochen, was his invention of a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers. This continuum of numbers includes not only real numbers such as integers, fractions and irrational numbers such as pi, but also the infinitesimal and infinite numbers.

Hank Steinbrenner, one of the heirs to the New York Yankees.

By way of Lawrence: Keith Ferrell, writer, former editor in chief of Omni, and another one of those people who sounds like a really good guy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2020 at 11:57 am and is filed under Geek, Obits, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.