John Horton Conway, RIP

Mathematician John Horton Conway passed away late last week, probably of COVID-19. Conway was a prodigiously talented mathematician and a fascinating person. He's probably best known for inventing the Game of Life, which spawned a whole new realm of computing. The Guardian has a long profile of him, which I highly recommend reading. 

That same year he also invented the Game of Life, a cellular automaton that to this day retains cult status. It is not a game proper; Conway calls it a “no-player never-ending” game. It is played on a grid, like tic-tac-toe and, according to three simple rules of Conway’s devising, the cells placed on the grid proliferate, resembling skittering micro-organisms viewed under a microscope. A cellular automaton is in essence a little machine with groups of cells that evolve from iteration to iteration in discrete rather than continuous time – in seconds, say, each tick of the clock advances the next iteration, and then over time, behaving a bit like a transformer or a shape-shifter, the cells evolve into something, anything, everything else. As such, the Game of Life demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity, providing an analogy for all of mathematics, and the entire universe.