Remembering John Conway and the Game of Life

Yesterday I heard the very sad news that the mathematician Professor John Conway lost his life to the Covid-19 virus.

Mathematicians aren’t generally widely known, but Conway was one of those that had an impact outside the academic community. As well as esoteric group theory, he came up with the Game of Life. This uses simple rules to create complexity and is a fascinating insight into the concept of self-organising systems, the most famous and well known of which is life itself.

The rules are simple: in a grid of cells each can be either alive or dead, and the number of neighbouring cells which are currently alive determines which are alive at the next cycle. From this basis, complex behaviour can be observed, such as this mechanism that creates objects that glide across the grid:

Glider Gun (from Wikipedia)

I was lucky enough to be taught by Conway during my time studying mathematics at Cambridge. It was a brilliant series of lectures from a unique individual.

Conway would usually be seen in shorts and sandals, even in the depths of winter, and would often do his work at a table at the Copper Kettle on Kings Parade.

He taught us about numbers. For example I remember him showing us why you should always start counting from zero and to make sure we understood he brought in a full Sainsbury’s shopping bag and took items out of it one by one, starting, of course, from zero. From there we went on the the various types of infinity and inspired in me a love of transfinite numbers.

It was a good time to be at Cambridge, for as well as Conway the maths department also had Professor Stephen Hawking, a familiar site in the departmental coffee room and zooming around town in his electric wheel chair, though I wasn’t lucky enough to be taught by him.

John Conway and Stephen Hawking: experts in artificial life, artificial intelligence and space, all themes of the Noctilucents trilogy.