Year: 2022

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

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

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

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

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

THE GAME OF LIFE. "Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by mathematician John von Neumann, who attempted to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself and succeeded when he found a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid. The Game of Life emerged as Conway's successful attempt to drastically simplify von Neumann's ideas." https://lnkd.in/dzs-Kxk View in LinkedIn

VIDEO INTRODUCTION. "Stephen Hawking's The Meaning of Life (John Conway's Game of Life segment)." A very provocative video clip that introduces the Game. Strongly suggest viewing. https://lnkd.in/dBAbK7j View in LinkedIn

CELLULAR AUTOMATA. "The game made Conway instantly famous, but it also opened up a whole new field of mathematical research, the field of cellular automata ... Because of Life's analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called "simulation games" (games that resemble real life processes)." https://lnkd.in/dzs-Kxk View in LinkedIn

"THE GAME OF LIFE is not your typical computer game. It is a 'cellular automaton', and was invented by Cambridge mathematician John Conway. This game became widely known when it was mentioned in an article published by Scientific American in 1970. It consists of a collection of cells which, based on a few mathematical rules, can live, die or multiply. Depending on the initial conditions, the cells form various patterns throughout the course of the game." https://lnkd.in/dVq7BAk View in LinkedIn

SMALL DIFFERENCES MAGNIFY, as shown in the Game of Life. See this very compelling lecture by Stanford's Professor Sapoloski. The simplest of rules in this computer game is similar to those of living systems. https://lnkd.in/d2JdRWs View in LinkedIn