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John Conway has died

The Aperiodical 2020-04-13

File:John H Conway 2005.jpgConway in 2005; photo by Thane Plambeck

Mathematician John Horton Conway, a professor at both the University of Cambridge and Princeton University, and the originator of hundreds of lovely and clever maths things, has died at the age of 82.

Notably, over the weekend Twitter has been filled with an outpouring of tweets and threads of people recounting their favourite John Conway stories and memories. Inspired by (and slightly cribbing from) Ben Orlin’s thread of tributes, we’ve collected some here for you to read through and remember John Conway, giant of mathematics.

RIP John Conway. I asked him a lot of questions when I was a postdoc at Princeton and he always had a lengthy, deep, informative answer

— Jordan Ellenberg (@JSEllenberg) April 11, 2020

I'm reading reports that John Conway has died. This is very sad – he was a fascinating and incredibly talented mathematician who was responsible for lots of amazing mathematics.

— Dr Nicholas Jackson (@njj4) April 11, 2020

Very sorry to hear this. I was taught by Conway as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and a little under 20 years later was a colleague of his for two years at Princeton. I first met him at a maths event just before I went to Cambridge. By way of small talk, he …1/ https://t.co/WAmVqc695H

— Timothy Gowers (@wtgowers) April 11, 2020

Conway made several videos with Brady Haran, creator of the Numberphile YouTube channel:

I only met the legendary John Conway one time, but he generously spoke on all sorts of topics. His honest and revealing thoughts on life -and death – seem all the more poignant today. https://t.co/7CxI6i856a He leaves an incredible legacy to mathematics.

— Numberphile (@numberphile) April 11, 2020

Like most people who spent time in the Princeton math department, I have some Conway encounters to share … https://t.co/v6KCoefhyT

— Michael J Barany (@MBarany) April 12, 2020

I spent a very memorable day 36 years ago touring John around the UPenn campus. I was very intimidated that the Penn department would entrust a great mathematician to a green undergraduate. I talked to him about exceptional algebraic structures until he said something unexpected: https://t.co/taQYXN8Vad

— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) April 12, 2020

(1/3) I was sad to learn that mathematical legend John Horton Conway died yesterday. I had the pleasure of working with him on combinatorial games in the 1980s and conversing with him on and off over the following decades and attending many of his unfailingly entertaining talks.

— James Propp (@JimPropp) April 12, 2020

This is just awful news. My introduction to "real" mathematics came in the fall of my freshman year, when I took Linear Algebra from Conway. We have 100 Conway stories from that one course alone. How do you learn vector spaces? Compute dimension of the space of 3×3 magic squares! https://t.co/8EnbSzGpZq

— Alex Kontorovich (@AlexKontorovich) April 11, 2020

Several tweets from Robin Houston sharing lovely Conway things:

The story of Conway’s invention of the filing cabinet, from Richard K. Guy’s biographical essay in Mathematical People: which, poignantly, opens with the words “It is a pleasure to write an obituary while the subject still breathes”. pic.twitter.com/BOBrHz5MI0

— Robin Houston (@robinhouston) April 12, 2020

Here is a better-quality video clip of John H Conway performing the knot trick that @wtgowers mentioned. It’s impressively done. Even watching it on a loop, I can’t see the sleight of hand. pic.twitter.com/8WuBWZ1PKy

— Robin Houston (@robinhouston) April 12, 2020

Very sad to hear John H Conway has died. I loved the biography by @sioroberts. Here’s a taste of it: https://t.co/eFpC23lZy2

— Robin Houston (@robinhouston) April 11, 2020

The book mentioned in the Tweet above is Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway by Siobhan Roberts, which we reviewed here when it came out in 2015.

Roberts’ biography makes some reference to the sometimes uncomfortable ways Conway exercised the privilege that accompanied his ‘oddball’ reputation. A Twitter thread begun by Dr. Wandering Point shares some less positive memories:

Look, I don’t want to be THAT GIRL again. But did anyone but me notice that all of these tributes, every one of them, is from a dude? https://t.co/8QvGzvz5K0

— Dr. Wandering Point (@WanderingPoint) April 12, 2020

I met him once, when I was a grad student visiting Princeton and was asked to give him a ride to dinner. He told me to call him "Daddy" and we didn't talk about math at all. And that's about the sum of it.

— Anna Haensch (@extremefriday) April 12, 2020

Many more tributes and recollections can be found online:

RIP John Conway, and thank you for your contributions to both mathematics and the universe.