Randall Munroe’s homage to Conway, riffing on Game of Life.
I am not a mathematician, but I played one on TV in a magazine—Quantum: The Magazine of Math and Science. That is how I learned about John Horton Conway, who passed away this week from complications of COVID-19.
Conway wrote five articles for Quantum, which was aimed primarily at students. The pieces might not have seen the light of day but for the midwifery of Quantum’s US Editor in Chief for Mathematics, William P. Thurston, a Princeton colleague. To accommodate Conway’s work habits, Thurston would come to Conway’s office and plop himself down next to him, staying there until the article was finished—so the story goes.
The computer simulation Game of Life is probably his claim to fame in the wider world of nonmathematicians. Absent Quantum even I might have stumbled upon it. It seems anyone with a computer in those days (i.e., the days of yore, aka the late 20th century) knew about it and could run it on their crummy PCs—it packed a lot of bang for its computational buck.
John Conway’s contributions to Quantum’s “Mathematical Surprises” column:
- Friezing Our Way into Summer (zigzag frieze patterns), May 1990, p. 50
- An Old Fact and Some New Ones (shape-numbers and number-shapes), September/October 1990, p. 24
- Play It Again … (inducing strange repetitions), November/December 1990, p. 30
- Calendar Calculations (“Doomsday” rule), January/February 1991, p. 46
- Some Mathematical Magic (“magic squares” and a magic tesseract), March/April 1991, p. 28
