جون هورتون كونواي FRS (و. 26 ديسمبر 1937 – ت. 11 أبريل 2020)، هورياضياتي إنگليزي ناشط في نظرية finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career. On 11 April 2020, at age 82, he died of complications from COVID-19.

السنوات المبكرة

لعبة الحياة

كونواي ومارتن گاردنر

أبحاثه

نظرية اللعبة التوافقية

Conway was widely known for his contributions to combinatorial game theory (CGT), a theory of partisan games. This he developed with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, and with them also co-authored the book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays. He also wrote the book On Numbers and Games (ONAG) which lays out the mathematical foundations of CGT.

He was also one of the inventors of sprouts, as well as philosopher's football. He developed detailed analyses of many other games and puzzles, such as the Soma cube, peg solitaire, and Conway's soldiers. He came up with the angel problem, which was solved in 2006.

He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novelette by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of ONAG.

الهندسة

In the mid-1960s with Michael Guy, Conway established that there are sixty-four convex uniform polychora excluding two infinite sets of prismatic forms. They discovered the grand antiprism in the process, the only non-Wythoffian uniform polychoron. Conway has also suggested a system of notation dedicated to describing polyhedra called Conway polyhedron notation.

In the theory of tessellations, he devised the Conway criterion which describes rules for deciding if a prototile will tile the plane.

He investigated lattices in higher dimensions and was the first to determine the symmetry group of the Leech lattice.

الطبولوجيا الهندسية

In knot theory, Conway formulated a new variation of the Alexander polynomial and produced a new invariant now called the Conway polynomial. After lying dormant for more than a decade, this concept became central to work in the 1980s on the novel knot polynomials. Conway further developed tangle theory and invented a system of notation for tabulating knots, nowadays known as Conway notation, while correcting a number of errors in the 19th-century knot tables and extending them to include all but four of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings.

نظرية المجموعات

He was the primary author of the ATLAS of Finite Groups giving properties of many finite simple groups. Working with his colleagues Robert Curtis and Simon P. Norton he constructed the first concrete representations of some of the sporadic groups. More specifically, he discovered three sporadic groups based on the symmetry of the Leech lattice, which have been designated the Conway groups. This work made him a key player in the successful classification of the finite simple groups.

Based on a 1978 observation by mathematician John McKay, Conway and Norton formulated the complex of conjectures known as monstrous moonshine. This subject, named by Conway, relates the monster group with elliptic modular functions, thus bridging two previously distinct areas of mathematics—finite groups and complex function theory. Monstrous moonshine theory has now been revealed to also have deep connections to string theory.

Conway introduced the Mathieu groupoid, an extension of the to 13 points.

نظرية الأرقام

As a graduate student, he proved one case of a conjecture by Edward Waring, that every integer could be written as the sum of 37 numbers each raised to the fifth power, though Chen Jingrun solved the problem independently before Conway's work could be published.

الجبر

Conway has written textbooks and done original work in algebra, focusing particularly on quaternions and octonions. Together with Neil Sloane, he invented the icosians.

التحليل

He invented a base 13 function as a counterexample to the converse of the intermediate value theorem: the function takes on every real value in each interval on the real line, so it has a Darboux property but is not continuous.

الخوارزميات

For calculating the day of the week, he invented the Doomsday algorithm. The algorithm is simple enough for anyone with basic arithmetic ability to do the calculations mentally. Conway could usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practised his calendrical calculations on his computer, which was programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logged on. One of his early books was on finite-state machines.

الفيزيائي النظرية

In 2004, Conway and Simon B. Kochen, another Princeton mathematician, proved the free will theorem, a startling version of the "no hidden variables" principle of quantum mechanics. It states that given certain conditions, if an experimenter can freely decide what quantities to measure in a particular experiment, then elementary particles must be free to choose their spins to make the measurements consistent with physical law. In Conway's provocative wording: "if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles."

جوائز وتكريمات

Conway received the Berwick Prize (1971), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1981), became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize (LMS) (1987), won the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000) of the American Mathematical Society. In 2001 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Liverpool.

His nomination, in 1981, reads:

A versatile mathematician who combines a deep combinatorial insight with algebraic virtuosity, particularly in the construction and manipulation of "off-beat" algebraic structures which illuminate a wide variety of problems in completely unexpected ways. He has made distinguished contributions to the theory of finite groups, to the theory of knots, to mathematical logic (both set theory and automata theory) and to the theory of games (as also to its practice).

In 2017 Conway was given honorary membership of the British Mathematical Association.

وفاته

فيثمانية أبريل 2020 تطورت لديه أعراض كوڤيد-19، وفي 11 أبريل، توفي كونواي في نيوبرنزويك، نيوجرزي في سن 82.

منشورات

• 1971 – Regular algebra and finite machines. Chapman and Hall, London, 1971, Series: Chapman and Hall mathematics series, نطقب:Isbn.
• 1976 – On numbers and games. Academic Press, New York, 1976, Series: L.M.S. monographs, 6, نطقب:Isbn.
• 1979 – On the Distribution of Values of Angles Determined by Coplanar Points (with Paul Erdős, Michael Guy, and H. T. Croft). Journal of the London Mathematical Society, vol. II, series 19, pp. 137–143.
• 1979 – Monstrous Moonshine (with Simon P. Norton).Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 11, issue 2, pp. 308–339.
• 1982 – Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays (with Richard K. Guy and Elwyn Berlekamp). Academic Press, نطقب:Isbn.
• 1985 – Atlas of finite groups (with Robert Turner Curtis, Simon Phillips Norton, Richard A. Parker, and Robert Arnott Wilson). Clarendon Press, New York, Oxford University Press, 1985, نطقب:Isbn.
• 1988 – Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups (with Neil Sloane). Springer-Verlag, New York, Series: Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, 290, نطقب:Isbn.
• 1995 – Minimal-Energy Clusters of Hard Spheres (with Neil Sloane, R. H. Hardin, and Tom Duff). Discrete & Computational Geometry, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 237–259.
• 1996 – The Book of Numbers (with Richard K. Guy). Copernicus, New York, 1996, نطقب:Isbn.
• 1997 – The Sensual (quadratic) Form (with Francis Yein Chei Fung). Mathematical Association of America, Washington, DC, 1997, Series: Carus mathematical monographs, no. 26, نطقب:Isbn.
• 2002 – On Quaternions and Octonions (with Derek A. Smith). A. K. Peters, Natick, MA, 2002, ISBN 1568811349.
• 2008 – The Symmetries of Things (with Heidi Burgiel and Chaim Goodman-Strauss). A. K. Peters, Wellesley, MA, 2008, ISBN 1568812205.

انظر أيضاً

• قائمة أشياء سميت على اسم جون هورتون كونواي

المصادر

المراجع

• Alpert, Mark (1999). Not Just Fun and Games Scientific American, April 1999
• Conway, John and Smith, Derek A. (2003). On quaternions and Octonions : their Geometry, Arithmetic, and Symmetry Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 2005, vol=42, issue=2, pp. 229–243, ISBN 1568811349
• Boden, Margaret (2006). Mind As Machine, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 1271
• Case, James (2014). Martin Gardner's Mathematical Grapevine Book Reviews of Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner and Martin Gardner in the Twenty-First Century, By James Case, SIAM News, 1 April 2014
• du Sautoy, Marcus (2008). Symmetry, HarperCollins, p. 308
• Guy, Richard K (1983). Conway's Prime Producing Machine Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Jan. 1983), pp. 26–33
• Harris, Michael (2015). Nature, 23 July 2015
• Mulcahy, Colm (2014). The Topعشرة Martin Gardner Scientific American Articles Scientific American, 21 October 2014
• Roberts, Siobhan (2015). Genius at play: The curious mind of John Horton Conway. Bloomsbury. ISBN .
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "جون هورتون كونواي", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive 
• جون هورتون كونواي at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Princeton University (2009). Bibliography of John H. Conway Mathematics Department
• Rendell, Paul (2015). Turing Machine Universality of the Game of Life Springer, July 2015, نطقب:Isbn
• Seife, Charles (1994). Impressions of Conway The Sciences
• Schleicher, Dierk (2011), Interview with John Conway, Notices of the AMS

وصلات خارجية

• نطقب:Scopus
• Conway, John (20 April 2009). "Proof of the Free Will Theorem" (Video). Archived Lectures.
• Conway. Videos. Numberphile. Video at YouTube
  • Look-and-Say Numbers. Feat John Conway (2014) at YouTube
  • Inventing the Game of Life (2014) at YouTube
• The Princeton Brick (2014) at YouTube Conway leading a tour of brickwork patterns in Princeton, lecturing on the ordinals and on sums of powers and the Bernoulli numbers
• necrology by Keith Hartnett in Quanta Magazine, April 20, 2020

نطقب:Conway's Game of Life

نطقب:FRS 1981 [[تصنيف::أكاديميون بريطانيون مغتربون في الولايات المتحدة]]