MYSTERIES OF THE EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE - HIKARI Ltd

Biographical Vignettes 179
known as Graham’s number, the largest number ever used in a mathematical
proof. He has also appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not for not only being one
of the world’s foremost Mathematicians but also a highly skilled trampolinist
and juggler. In fact, he has served as President of the American Mathematical
Society, Mathematical Association of America and the International Jugglers’
Association!. In 1999, he left his position as Director of Information Sciences at
Bell Labs to accept a Chaired Professorship at University of California at San
Diego which he still holds. He has been the recipient of the Pólya Prize, the
Allendoerfer Award, the Lester R. Ford Award, the Euler Medal and the Steele
Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of
the Association of Computing Machinery and the recipient of numerous honorary
degrees. He has published approximately 320 papers (77 of which are
coauthored with his wife, Fan Chung) and five books.
Vignette 41 (John Horton Conway: 1937-).
John Conway, perhaps the world’s most untidy Mathematician, was born in
Liverpool and educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge [230]. After
completing his B.A. in 1959, he commenced research in number theory under
the guidance of Harold Davenport. During his studies at Cambridge, he developed
his interest in games and spent hours playing backgammon in the common
room. He earned his doctorate in 1964, was appointed Lecturer in Pure Mathematics
at Cambridge and began working in mathematical logic. However, his
first major result came in finite group theory when, in 1968, he unearthed a previously
undiscovered finite simple group, of order 8, 315, 553, 613, 086, 720, 000
with many interesting subgroups, in his study of the Leech lattice of sphere
packing in 24 dimensions! He became widely known outside of Mathematics
proper with the appearance of Martin Gardner’s October 1970 Scientific
American article describing his Game of Life. It has been claimed that, since
that time, more computer time has been devoted to it than to any other single
activity. More importantly, it opened up the new mathematical field of
cellular automata. Also in 1970, he was elected to a fellowship at Gonville
and Caius and, three years later, he was promoted from Lecturer to Reader in
Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge. In his analysis
of the game of Go, he discovered a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers.
He has also analyzed many other puzzles and games such as the Soma
cube and peg solitaire and invented many others such as Conway’s Soldiers
and the Angels and Devils Game. He is the inventor of the Doomsday algorithm
for calculating the day of the week and, with S. B. Kochen, proved the
Free Will Theorem of Quantum Mechanics whereby “If experimenters have free
will then so do elementary particles.” A better appreciation of the wide swath
cut by his mathematical contributions can be gained by perusing Property 22