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RARE POLYMATH. "John Horton Conway. 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. 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.” https://lnkd.in/d7BeTe8 View in LinkedIn

JOHN CONWAY. "Now 77, John Horton Conway is perhaps the world’s most lovable egomaniac. He is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, and Richard Feynman, all rolled into one. For many years, he worried that his obsession with playing silly games was ruining his career – until he realised that it could lead to extraordinary discoveries." Read this biography of this extraordinary man. https://lnkd.in/d7BeTe8 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of three weekends on plant clocks. These clocks are found in all creatures, and are very robust, internally-driven mechanisms that drive physiology and behavior. Plants may appear simple to some people, but this phenomenon reveals the complexity of these curious creatures that we share the planet with. View in LinkedIn

TEMPERATURE NEUTRALITY. "A third characteristic of all circadian rhythms is temperature compensation; the period remains relatively constant over a range of ambient temperatures. This is thought to be one facet of a general mechanism that buffers the clock against changes in cellular metabolism." https://lnkd.in/d4JRQbh View in LinkedIn

MATHEMATICAL RULES from the Game of Life. "The relative low density of stable life (resulting when we start with pseudo-random primordial soup) is more than compensated for by the rich variety and symmetry of small Life forms." https://lnkd.in/dN_g3Fs View in LinkedIn

ENDOGENOUS RHYTHMS. "A second defining attribute of circadian rhythms is that they are endogenously generated and self-sustaining, so they persist under constant environmental conditions, typically constant light (or dark) and constant temperature. Under these controlled conditions, the organism is deprived of external time cues, and the free-running period of ∼24 h is observed." https://lnkd.in/d4JRQbh View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY FROM SIMPLICITY. "The mathematician John Conway has put theory into practice when he created the Game of Life in 1970. The huge interest for this game derives from its incredible power to create very complex objects from ridiculously simple rules and especially to the visual displays that are much more meaningful for us than dry equations, of course." https://lnkd.in/d3B2FKW View in LinkedIn

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. "In wild type and in long– and short–circadian period mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana, plants with a clock period matched to the environment contain more chlorophyll, fix more carbon, grow faster, and survive better than plants with circadian periods differing from their environment. This explains why plants gain advantage from circadian control." https://lnkd.in/dXGrR6X View in LinkedIn

"A CELLULAR AUTOMATON is the child of mathematicians interested in the theory of self-reproducing objects. Alan Turing created already the computer and its algorithms with this idea in mind. John von Neumann built the theory for a self-reproducing machine." https://lnkd.in/d3B2FKW View in LinkedIn

ACROSS TAXA. "Circadian rhythms (from circa, approximately, and dies, day) have been described in a wide range of organisms ranging from cyanobacteria to mammals and at every level of organization." https://lnkd.in/d_f7kfY View in LinkedIn