![]() Conway also discovered a new class of numbers, infinitely large and infinitesimally small, which are now known as “surreal numbers”. He discovered a 24-dimensional symmetry group that came to bear his name, and, with his colleague Simon Norton, he illuminated the 196,883-dimensional Monster group with a paper titled “Monstrous Moonshine”. Before that, he spent three decades at Cambridge, where in the 1970s, he dived deep into the vast ocean of mathematical symmetry. According to Sir Michael Atiyah, former president of the Royal Society and arbiter of mathematical fashion, “Conway is the most magical mathematician in the world.”įor the last quarter century Conway has held the position of Princeton’s John von Neumann distinguished professor in applied and computational mathematics, now emeritus. He is one of the greatest living mathematicians, with a sly sense of humour, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a compulsion to explain everything about the world to everyone in it. He is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, and Richard Feynman, all rolled into one. Now 77, John Horton Conway is perhaps the world’s most lovable egomaniac. “Roughly speaking,” he recalled, “I was going to become the kind of person you see now. He would be boisterous and witty, he would tell funny stories at parties, he would laugh at himself – that was key. He worried that his introversion might be too entrenched, but he decided to try. As he sat on the train to Cambridge, it dawned on him that since none of his classmates would be joining him at university, he would be able to transform himself into a new person: an extrovert! He wasn’t sure it would work. These nicknames confirmed Conway as a terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware of his own suffering.Īfter loitering for a time with the teenage reprobates at the back of the classroom, Conway ultimately did well enough on the university entrance exams to receive a minor scholarship and get his name published in the Liverpool Daily Post. Instead of “Mary” he became known as “The Prof”. John said he wanted to read mathematics at Cambridge. Soon after term began, the headmaster called each boy into his office and asked what he planned to do with his life. ![]() Being Mary made his life absolute hell until he moved on to secondary school, at Liverpool’s Holt High School for Boys. In junior school, one of Conway’s teachers had nicknamed him “Mary”. ![]() During the five-hour journey, via Crewe with a connection in Bletchley, something dawned on him: this was a chance to reinvent himself. He travelled by steam train from Liverpool to Cambridge, where he was to start life as an undergraduate. He was a skinny 18-year-old, with long, unkempt hair – a sort of proto-hippie – and although he generally preferred to go barefoot, on this occasion he wore strappy Jesus sandals. I re-sized the resulting animated GIF with an external program, that’s another thing I still need to figure out in R.O n a late September day in 1956, John Horton Conway left home with a trunk on his back. I tried for nearly an hour to match the Black=living, White=dead scheme of Conway but couldn’t get that to work, maybe you can figure out how to do it. Green cells are “alive”, black ones are “dead”. The board size is fixed (see the configuration options at the beginning), whereas Conway’s version was played on a theoretically infinite grid. In my version, the rules for each cell are determined randomly, in advance of the game. It’s a variant of Conway’s Game of Life (not to be confused with the Milton Bradley version), where single celled lifeforms live or die based on how many living neighbors they have. The code below is my first test of using R to generate animations. So I picked R, with the idea that when I needed animations, I would find a way to build them. The drawbacks to Flash are that it is way behind R in terms of statistical tools, is a closed, expensive language to work with, and dispute widespread use it might be so weak that a single mobile computing company might kill it. ![]() Flash is also object oriented, well documented with hundreds of books and websites, and has a powerful (albeit challenging to learn) IDE which helps for large coding projects. It’s certainly possible to represent change and tell an evolving story with a single plot (see for example Tufte’s favorite infographic), but there are a lot more options when you can use animations. Most of my work involves evolutionary models that take place over time. Before I decided to learn R in a serious way, I thought about learning Flash/Actionscript instead. ![]()
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