Library SARC Research Person
John Horton Conway
British mathematician; inventor of the Game of Life and the surreal numbers.
John Horton Conway (1937–2020) took a BA in mathematics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1959 and a doctorate there in 1964 under Harold Davenport. He was a fellow and lecturer at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from 1964 to 1986, then held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton for the rest of his career. His Game of Life, a cellular automaton in which simple neighbor-counting rules generate self-sustaining and self-replicating patterns, reached a wide public after Martin Gardner featured it in Scientific American in October 1970 — by Gardner’s own account, the most popular column he ever wrote. Conway also developed the surreal numbers and combinatorial game theory, co-authoring On Numbers and Games and Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, formulated the “monstrous moonshine” conjecture with Simon Norton in 1979, and proved the free will theorem with Simon Kochen in 2004. He died in April 2020 from complications of COVID-19.
Works in the Library
John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, John Conway CONCEPT
A grid of cells, each in one of a small set of states, updated all at once by a simple local rule — from which strikingly complex global behavior can emerge.
FORM MORPHOGENESIS DYNAMICS COMPUTATION