John Conway died of COVID-19

[Dewt]

Loss of an interesting mind. I don't know much about the chap himself, only his work. Please make game of life jokes.

[pancreas]

I played backgammon with him once in the CIRM in Luminy about 5/6 years ago. Pretty sure he won. He was on his way out even then.

Amazing mathematician of course.

One fun thing he came up with was the 'say what you see' sequence.

Starts with 1, then look at it and see 'one 1=11' then look at that and see '21' then '1211' ... Seems totally stupid but has interesting asymptotic properties. For example you can prove only the number 1,2,3 ever appear.

[Dewt]

Starts with 1, then look at it and see 'one 1=11' then look at that and see '21' then '1211' ... Seems totally stupid but has interesting asymptotic properties. For example you can prove only the number 1,2,3 ever appear.

I think I saw some proof by induction thing about that in one of my undergrad textbooks when it was trying to pretend that it had fun content.

I played backgammon with him once in the CIRM in Luminy about 5/6 years ago. Pretty sure he won. He was on his way out even then.

This is your "met him at a charity do".

[BlodwynPig]

I invented a similar game "Say what you don't see"

[Johnny Yesno]

Well, it's embarrassing that I didn't hear about Conway's passing till reading this thread, given my avatar. RIP mate and thanks for absolutely fucking blowing my tiny mind.

[Johnny Yesno]

These Numberphile videos with Conway are worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA&list=PLt5AfwLFPxWIL8XA1npoNAHseS-j1y-7V&index=1

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

He was good as Kenickie in " Grease".

[kalowski]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/apr/20/can-you-solve-it-john-horton-conway-playful-maths-genius

[Dewt]

He looked like Slavoj Žižek