R.I.P. John Conway, age 82, died from COVID-19 in my home state of New Jersey, April 11, 2020.

You can read about Conway on Wikipedia, but this Mathematician was extremely involved with mathematical games.  I have been a big fan of his 'Game of Life', and I still have my 'Soma' cube puzzle.  He worked with Guy and Berlekamp on the classic book 'Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays'.

mc

Sad news. Indeed. Thank you for sharing the info.

I saw some easy videos a few year's ago. I just checked again and it is the “Numberphile” educational youtube channel. (In my memory he was reacting to the 2048 game but that wasn't him.)

If any of you want to pay a tribute you can watch him explain how he was tired of having his name attached to the game of life and none of the work that was most important in his own (life I mean).

For the lazy ones here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8kUJL04ELA

He didn't hate it that much because he goes on explaining the whole thing once more to the interviewer. Maybe to avoid “dying of isolation”.

Watching the free will lectures (6 x 1 hour)

one conclusion maybe that separation causes opposites in spin / magnetism / electric

Correction: I misread the Wikipedia biography. While John Conway did much ANALYSIS on the SOMA Cube, it's creator was Piet Hein. mc.

While watching fractran lecture noticed that he was writing with chalk on blackboard with right hand

But in freewill theorem part 6 he was writing with left hand

(Found out he had a stroke in 2006)

As a thinker about Collatz, I had read about fractran and it seemed quite complicated, when JH Conway lectures, it is so limpid and amazing, great lecture !

Fantastic video of French El jj on Conway 10 great achievements:

https://youtu.be/9Hpy6MKM-J8 , English auto-translate captions are ok.

I enjoyed reading The Book of Numbers that Conway co-authored with Richard Guy.

I lived in San Francisco in the '90s and went to Conway's Fractran lecture at UC Berkeley on 18 March 1996.  Good stuff.

It's from reading about Conway that I first heard of the Monster Group.