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Happy Birthday - John Conway

John Conway turns 70 on 12/26 Who He you ask? Luboš Motl has a nice biography - the guy has been busy and is involved in a lot of different areas. A polymath and a genius.

John Conway: 70th birthday
John Horton Conway, a famous English mathematician, was born exactly 70 years ago, on 12/26/1937. Congratulations! He has contributed great things to game theory and algorithmics, group theory, geometry (classification of polychora), knot theory (applications of skein relations that led to knot polynomials), and theoretical physics.

A few of the things he has worked with:

"Game of Life" and other fun things for adult children

Conway's inventions in recreational mathematics and his popularization pieces and books are far too numerous to enumerate here. He can calculate the day of the week in two seconds or so, using his Doomsday Al Gore Rhythm. Also, Conway's "Game of Life" remains the most popular cellular automaton.

And a little bit on his Free will theorem

The free will theorem is a very cute sharpened reformulation of the hidden variables no-go theorems that can be phrased in the following way:

If experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles.

Because this statement may sound too entertaining, let me emphasize that it is not a caricature of the theorem. They actually prove nothing else than the exact, most obvious interpretation of the sentence above.

And a couple other good ones. Conway is one of those people who crop up every so often to make the world interesting and to shake things up a bit for complacent scholars... We need more people like him! Posted by DaveH at December 25, 2007 9:20 PM | TrackBack