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GYMNASTICS. "He's also been infatuated with factoring large numbers in his head; with reciting pi from memory to 1,111+ digits; with calculating, nearly instantaneously, the day of the week for any given date using what he calls his “Doomsday” algorithm." https://lnkd.in/d7BeTe8 View in LinkedIn

SURREAL NUMBERS. "Conway also discovered a new class of numbers, infinitely large and infinitesimally small, which are now known as “surreal numbers”. Those achievements earned him a spot as a fellow of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the oldest scientific society in the world." https://lnkd.in/d7BeTe8 View in LinkedIn

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

SIMPLICITY GENERATES COMPLEXITY. "A first for the game, the replicator demonstrates how astounding complexity can arise from simple beginnings and processes – an echo of life’s origins, perhaps." https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

EXPANSION TO 3D. "But let us expand the two-dimensional hexagonal grid into three dimensions...Conway's entire universe, or an infinite number of parallel universes, can be contained with time-space barriers." https://lnkd.in/dN_g3Fs View in LinkedIn

GROUND-BREAKING. "When Wade posted his self-replicating mathematical organism on a Life community website on 18 May, it sparked a wave of excitement. “This is truly ground-breaking work,” wrote a fellow Life enthusiast, Adam Goucher, on the website Game of Life News. “In fact, this is arguably the single most impressive and important pattern ever devised.” https://lnkd.in/d-ckTpQ View in LinkedIn

GEMINI STATS VS LIFE. "And it replicates in only 34 million generations?! The best estimate so far for a typical UCC-based Life replicator was 10^18 generations. I see that you have removed all but the bare minimum -- that is probably the simplest possible self-replicator, and very elegant, too. Well, congratulations -- you have single-handedly beaten the collaborative effort between myself, Dave Greene and Paul Chapman to realise a Life replicator." https://lnkd.in/dpf5iAu View in LinkedIn

GEMINI. "On May 18, 2010, Andrew J. Wade announced a self-constructing pattern dubbed Gemini which creates a copy of itself while destroying its parent. This pattern replicates in 34 million generations, and uses an instruction tape made of gliders which oscillate between two stable configurations made of Chapman-Greene construction arms. These, in turn, create new copies of the pattern, and destroy the previous copy." https://lnkd.in/dzs-Kxk View in LinkedIn