John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway ( born December 26, 1937 in Liverpool) is an English mathematician.
Life and work
John Horton Conway studied number theory at the University of Cambridge under Harold Davenport and was a professor there in 1964 ( Fellow ) for mathematics.
Conway is known for his work on combinatorial game theory, which he, among others, the books "On Numbers and Games " ( Original: "On Numbers and Games "), " number magic " ( "The Book of Numbers" ) and "Win: Strategies for math games " ( " Winning Ways for Your mathematical Plays ", Elwyn Berlekamp and together with Richard Kenneth Guy ) has published. He created numerous mathematical games, including the famous Game of Life and the play Sprouts. He discovered the surreal numbers (the title of a book in which Donald Knuth popularized this work ), a number defined in analogy to Dedekind cut, which includes games and cardinal numbers.
Conway has enriched the " recreational mathematics " in the broadest sense to include numerous other original contributions. For example, he has the Doomsday method to conveniently calculate the day of the week, which was named after him Conway sequence and a " prime machine" ( formula, all primes and only this has a solution ) invented.
Conway discovered in the late 1960s, three new sporadic finite simple groups, the Conway groups named after him, as he dealt with the Leech lattice. He also simplified the structure of the last and largest found sporadic group, the "Monsters " ( by the discoverer, but prefer to be called "friendly giant" ). In a famous work by Simon Norton from the end of the 1970s, he pointed to correlations of the ( dimensions of the irreducible ) representations of the monster with the expansion coefficients of the elliptic modular function out for the title of her essay " monstrous moonshine " called ( they were based on an observation John McKay ). Many of the presumed relationships were later proved by Conway PhD student Richard Borcherds, which it received the Fields Medal.
With Neil Sloane, he published in 1988 the monumental work "Sphere packings, lattices and groups" in the Springer series " fundamental doctrines of the mathematical sciences " ( 3rd edition, 1999), which summarizes many original own research contributions to the theory of grid and sphere packings are.
He was also involved in knot theory, crystallographic space groups and tilings.
With Richard Kenneth Guy Conway published the "Book of numbers", are discussed in the semi - popular many results in number theory (and many games). He also wrote books on quadratic forms ("The sensual ( quadratic ) form" ) and Algebras ( " Quaternions and octonions ").
According to his most important achievements asked, he raised his 2013 discovery of surreal figures show, and his proof of a Free Will theorem in quantum mechanics with Simon cooking, and less his work in group theory, for which he is best known. The Free Will Theorem was proved by Conway and cooking in 2004 and says that if the experimenter freedom of choice (free will, opportunity not predetermined behavior ) is present, this also applies to all elementary particles.
Conway's work has been recognized with numerous mathematical Awards. In 1987 he was awarded the Pólya Prize of the London Mathematical Society, 1998 Nemmers Prize for mathematics and 2000, the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society. Currently he is the John von Neumann Professor at Princeton University. In 1994 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Zurich ( Sphere Packings, Lattices, Codes and Greed ) and he was invited speaker at the ICM 1978 in Helsinki ( Arithmetical operations on transfinite numbers ) and 1970 in Nice (The subgroup structure of the exceptional simple groups).
He was married three times and has seven children. The Coxeter biographer Siobhan Roberts is working on his biography.