Because all of the memorials and obituaries of Conway are likely to show recent photos of him as an elderly man, I kind of wanted this photo to be the one everyone thinks of when they hear is name.
This is John Conway in the late '70s, huddled over a very early computer terminal which is displaying a configuration from Conway's Game.
John Conway (along with Martin Gardner) was one of the first people to ever help me understand that mathematics was beautiful and was something other than just numbers and equations. One of the reasons I first learned to program a computer was so I could write a program to carry out "Conway's Game", which later came to be known as "Life".
I was a teenage boy in when I was first introduced to Conway's ideas, and they were a wonder.
I think the first time I ever wandered into the mind-field of John Conway was in Gardner's columns in the back of "Scientific American" (lovingly donated by my neighbour). Later, because I was fascinated by this new (to me) concept of algorithms, I found Conway again in Donald's Knuth's book about "Surreal numbers" and the entire algebra that Conway built around them.
The man was a creator of fantastically creative algorithms to describe everything from the obscure to the prosaic. (And he regularly juggled 24-dimensional spaces) From the outside, his mind could sometimes appear as a madness. After one wandered into the sphere(packing!) of his ideas from the twenty or thirty different directions one is prone to encountering them from, it became obvious:
John Conway contained multitudes.
John Conway passed away from COVID-19 a few hours ago, April 11th, 2020.
When the opportunity arises, I think I will teach my kids about Conway's game... and emergent order.
