RIP John Conway

[Jubal]

John Conway, mathematician and creator of Conway's Game of Life, has apparently died of Coronavirus aged 82.

There's a long profile of him from a few years ago here. My knowledge of him only really comes from the Game of Life, which is a set of rules for a cellular automaton (almost bitterly ironically, one of the key rules being "a cell with too many live neighbours is overcrowded and dies"). But he had a lot of other mathematical achievements, most of which I'm too tired and not enough of a mathematician to get my head around.

You can find an implementation of the Game of Life here.

[dubsartur]

He got a SMBC comic!

[Glaurung]

And also xkcd.

[Jubal]

The XKCD one is very neat

And also the Life implementation I linked in the first post now has the XKCD John Conway figure as its new standard loadout, so you can see how it works and produces the glider step by step.