John Horton Conway

For other persons with this name, see John Conway.
John Conway
Born John Horton Conway
(1937-12-26) 26 December 1937[1]
Liverpool, Lancashire, England
Residence United States
Nationality British
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Princeton University
Alma mater University of Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD)
Thesis Homogeneous ordered sets (1964)
Doctoral advisor Harold Davenport[2]
Doctoral students
Known for
Notable awards
Website
math.princeton.edu/directory/john-conway

John Horton Conway FRS[3] (/ˈkɒnweɪ/; born 26 December 1937) is an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics, notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Conway is currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

Education and early life

Conway was born in Liverpool,[11] the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce.[10] He became interested in mathematics at a very early age; his mother has recalled that he could recite the powers of two when he was four years old. By the age of eleven his ambition was to become a mathematician.

After leaving secondary school, Conway entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge[1][12] to study mathematics. Conway, who was a "terribly introverted adolescent" in school, interpreted his admission to Cambridge as an opportunity to transform himself into a new person: an "extrovert".[13][14]

He was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 and began to undertake research in number theory supervised by Harold Davenport. Having solved the open problem posed by Davenport on writing numbers as the sums of fifth powers, Conway began to become interested in infinite ordinals. It appears that his interest in games began during his years studying the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, where he became an avid backgammon player, spending hours playing the game in the common room. He was awarded his doctorate in 1964 and was appointed as College Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

Research

After leaving Cambridge in 1986, he took up the appointment to the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University.


Combinatorial game theory

A single Gosper's Glider Gun creating "gliders" in Conway's Game of Life

Among amateur mathematicians, he is perhaps most widely known for his contributions to combinatorial game theory (CGT), a theory of partisan games. This he developed with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, and with them also co-authored the book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays. He also wrote the book On Numbers and Games (ONAG) which lays out the mathematical foundations of CGT.

He is also one of the inventors of sprouts, as well as philosopher's football. He developed detailed analyses of many other games and puzzles, such as the Soma cube, peg solitaire, and Conway's soldiers. He came up with the angel problem, which was solved in 2006.

He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novel by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of ONAG.

Conway's Game of Life

Conway is especially known for the invention of the Game of Life, one of the early examples of a cellular automaton. His initial experiments in that field were done with pen and paper, long before personal computers existed.

Conway's career is intertwined with mathematics popularizer and Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner. When Gardner featured Conway's Game of Life in his Mathematical Games column in October 1970, it became the most widely read of all his columns and made Conway an instant celebrity.[15] [16] Gardner and Conway had first corresponded in the late 1950s, and over the years Gardner had frequently written about recreational aspects of Conway's work.[17] For instance, he discussed Conway's game of Sprouts (Jul 1967), Hackenbush (Jan 1972), and his angel and devil problem (Feb 1974). In the September 1976 column he reviewed Conway's book On Numbers and Games and introduced the public to Conway's surreal numbers.[18] Conferences called Gathering 4 Gardner are held every two years to celebrate the legacy of Martin Gardner, and Conway himself is often a featured speaker at these events, discussing various aspects of recreational mathematics.[19][20]

Geometry

In the mid-1960s with Michael Guy, son of Richard Guy, he established that there are sixty-four convex uniform polychora excluding two infinite sets of prismatic forms. They discovered the grand antiprism in the process, the only non-Wythoffian uniform polychoron. Conway has also suggested a system of notation dedicated to describing polyhedra called Conway polyhedron notation.

In the theory of tessellations, he devised the Conway criterion which describes rules for deciding if a prototile will tile the plane.[21]

He investigated lattices in higher dimensions, and was the first to determine the symmetry group of the Leech lattice.

Geometric topology

Conway's approach to computing the Alexander polynomial of knot theory involved skein relations, by a variant now called the Alexander-Conway polynomial. After lying dormant for more than a decade, this concept became central to work in the 1980s on the novel knot polynomials. Conway further developed tangle theory and invented a system of notation for tabulating knots, nowadays known as Conway notation, while correcting a number of errors in the 19th century knot tables and extending them to include all but four of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings [Topology Proceedings 7 (1982) 118].

Group theory

He worked on the classification of finite simple groups and discovered the Conway groups. He was the primary author of the ATLAS of Finite Groups giving properties of many finite simple groups. He, along with collaborators, constructed the first concrete representations of some of the sporadic groups. More specifically, he discovered three sporadic groups based on the symmetry of the Leech lattice, which have been designated the Conway groups.

With Simon P. Norton he formulated the complex of conjectures relating the monster group with modular functions, which was named monstrous moonshine by them.

He introduced the Mathieu groupoid, an extension of the Mathieu group M12 to 13 points.

Number theory

As a graduate student, he proved the conjecture by Edward Waring that every integer could be written as the sum of 37 numbers, each raised to the fifth power, though Chen Jingrun solved the problem independently before the work could be published.[22]

Algebra

He has also done work in algebra, particularly with quaternions. Together with Neil Sloane, he invented the icosians.[23]

Analysis

He invented a base 13 function as a counterexample to the converse of the intermediate value theorem: the function takes on every real value in each interval on the real line, so it has a Darboux property but is not continuous.

Algorithmics

For calculating the day of the week, he invented the Doomsday algorithm. The algorithm is simple enough for anyone with basic arithmetic ability to do the calculations mentally. Conway can usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practices his calendrical calculations on his computer, which is programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logs on. One of his early books was on finite state machines.

Theoretical physics

In 2004, Conway and Simon B. Kochen, another Princeton mathematician, proved the free will theorem, a startling version of the 'no hidden variables' principle of quantum mechanics. It states that given certain conditions, if an experimenter can freely decide what quantities to measure in a particular experiment, then elementary particles must be free to choose their spins to make the measurements consistent with physical law. In Conway's provocative wording: "if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles."

Publications

Awards and honours

Conway received the Berwick Prize (1971),[26] was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1981),[3] was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize (LMS) (1987),[26] won the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000) of the American Mathematical Society.

His nomination reads:

A versatile mathematician who combines a deep combinatorial insight with algebraic virtuosity, particularly in the construction and manipulation of "off-beat" algebraic structures which illuminate a wide variety of problems in completely unexpected ways. He has made distinguished contributions to the theory of finite groups, to the theory of knots, to mathematical logic (both set theory and automata theory) and to the theory of games (as also to its practice).[3]

Personal life

According to a 2015 biography, Conway has been thrice married and twice divorced, and has suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and depression.[27] Though now retired, he still resides in Princeton.

References

  1. 1 2 "CONWAY, Prof. John Horton". Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press.(subscription required)
  2. 1 2 3 4 John Horton Conway at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 1 2 3 4 "EC/1981/11: Conway, John Horton". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 26 May 2014.
  4. ↑ Conway, J. H.; Hardin, R. H.; Sloane, N. J. A. (1996). "Packing Lines, Planes, etc.: Packings in Grassmannian Spaces". Experimental Mathematics. 5 (2): 139. doi:10.1080/10586458.1996.10504585.
  5. ↑ John Horton Conway's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier. (subscription required)
  6. ↑ Conway, J. H.; Sloane, N. J. A. (1990). "A new upper bound on the minimal distance of self-dual codes". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 36 (6): 1319. doi:10.1109/18.59931.
  7. ↑ Conway, J. H.; Sloane, N. J. A. (1993). "Self-dual codes over the integers modulo 4". Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. 62: 30. doi:10.1016/0097-3165(93)90070-O.
  8. ↑ Conway, J.; Sloane, N. (1982). "Fast quantizing and decoding and algorithms for lattice quantizers and codes". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 28 (2): 227. doi:10.1109/TIT.1982.1056484.
  9. ↑ Conway, J. H.; Lagarias, J. C. (1990). "Tiling with polyominoes and combinatorial group theory". Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. 53 (2): 183. doi:10.1016/0097-3165(90)90057-4.
  10. 1 2 O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "John Horton Conway", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
  11. ↑ "John Conway". www.nndb.com. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  12. ↑ "Professor John Conway MA PhD FRS".
  13. ↑ Roberts, Siobhan (23 July 2015). "John Horton Conway: the world's most charismatic mathematician". The Guardian.
  14. ↑ Mark Ronan (18 May 2006). Symmetry and the Monster: One of the greatest quests of mathematics. Oxford University Press, UK. p. 163. ISBN 978-0-19-157938-7.
  15. ↑ Martin Gardner, puzzle master extraordinaire by Colm Mulcahy, BBC News Magazine, October 21, 2014: "The Game of Life appeared in Scientific American in 1970, and was by far the most successful of Gardner's columns, in terms of reader response."
  16. ↑ The Top 10 Martin Gardner Scientific American Articles
  17. ↑ The Math Factor Podcast Website John H. Conway reminisces on his long friendship and collaboration with Martin Gardner.
  18. ↑ Martin Gardner, Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers, W. H. Freeman & Co., 1989, ISBN 0-7167-1987-8, Chapter 4. A non-technical overview; reprint of the 1976 Scientific American article.
  19. ↑ Presentation Videos from 2014 Gathering 4 Gardner
  20. ↑ Bellos, Alex (2008). The science of fun The Guardian, May 30, 2008
  21. ↑ Planar tilings by polyominoes, polyhexes, and polyiamonds by Glenn C. Rhoads, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics Vol 174, Issue 2, 15 (Feb 15, 2005), pp. 329–353
  22. ↑ Breakfast with John Horton Conway
  23. ↑ John Baez (October 2, 1993). "This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 20)".
  24. ↑ Baez, John C. (2005). "Review: On quaternions and octonions: Their geometry, arithmetic, and symmetry, by John H. Conway and Derek A. Smith" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 42 (2): 229–243. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-05-01043-8.
  25. ↑ Guy, Richard K. (1989). "Review: Sphere packings, lattices and groups, by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 21 (1): 142–147. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1989-15795-9.
  26. 1 2 LMS Prizewinners
  27. ↑ Review of Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway (Siobhan Roberts Bloomsbury: 2015) by Michael Harris in Nature 523, 406–407 (23 July 2015) doi:10.1038/523406a

Further reading

External links

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