John Conway grew tired of being famous for the Game of Life
In October 1970 Martin Gardner's Scientific American column described a pen-and-paper pastime in which cells on a grid live or die by simple rules. It became Gardner's most-read column ever and made John Horton Conway an instant celebrity. Conway later resented that it overshadowed his deeper work.
Conway was born in Liverpool on 26 December 1937 and knew by eleven that he wanted to be a mathematician. A painfully introverted schoolboy, he treated arriving at Cambridge as a chance to reinvent himself as an extrovert, and he was later dubbed the world's most charismatic mathematician. Backgammon marathons in the common room fed a lifelong love of games. He stayed at Cambridge until 1986, then held the John von Neumann chair at Princeton, where he once won the Pi Day pie-eating contest.
The Game of Life launched the field of cellular automata and is Turing complete, able in principle to compute anything a computer can. But Conway's serious legacy is broad. He was the main author of the ATLAS of Finite Groups, discovered three sporadic groups tied to the symmetries of the Leech lattice, now called the Conway groups, and helped complete the classification of finite simple groups. With Simon Norton he framed monstrous moonshine, an unexpected bridge between the largest sporadic group and modular functions that later turned up in string theory.
He invented surreal numbers, which Donald Knuth turned into a short novel, co-wrote Winning Ways on the mathematics of games, created the Conway polynomial for knots, and proved a generalised Collatz problem undecidable. For fun he devised the Doomsday algorithm for finding the day of the week and could usually name it within two seconds, drilled by a computer that quizzed him at every login. With Simon Kochen he proved the free will theorem, joking that if experimenters have free will, so do particles.
His former student Terence Tao praised his knack for extremely weird connections. Conway died in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on 11 April 2020, aged 82, of complications from COVID-19.
Source: John Horton Conway
