RSBM 2021 0034

Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.
org/ on 21 April 2023
JOHN HORTON CONWAY

26 December 1937 — 11 April 2020
Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 72, 117–138 (2022)

Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/ on 21 April 2023
JOHN HORTON CONWAY
26 December 1937 — 11 April 2020
Elected FRS 1981
By Robert Turner Curtis*
School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,

Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
John Conway was without doubt one of the most celebrated British mathematicians of the
last half century. He first gained international recognition in 1968 when he constructed the
automorphism group of the then recently-discovered Leech lattice, and in so doing discovered
three new sporadic simple groups. At around the same time he invented The Game of Life,
which brought him to the attention of a much wider audience and led to a cult following
of Lifers. He also combined the methods of Cantor and Dedekind for extending number
systems to construct what Donald Knuth (ForMemRS 2003) called ‘surreal numbers’, the
achievement of which Conway was probably most proud. Throughout his life he continued
to make significant contributions to many branches of mathematics, including number theory,
logic, algebra, combinatorics and geometry, and in his later years he teamed up with Simon
Kochen to produce the Free Will theorem, which asserts that if humans have free will then, in
a certain sense, so do elementary particles. In this biographical memoir I attempt to give some
idea of the depth and breadth of Conway’s contribution to mathematics.
The early years

John Conway was born in Liverpool on 26 December 1937 to Cyril and Agnes Conway, who
already had two daughters. During World War II the city was subjected to one of the most
devastating and sustained bombing attacks in Britain and, consequently, as a toddler John was
evacuated to Bangor in North Wales. Returning home after the war he very soon demonstrated
a profound fascination for mathematics, and it became clear that he had great natural talent.
* Email: robcurtis.mog@gmail.com
2021 The Author(s)

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbm.2021.0034 119 Published by the Royal Society
120 Biographical Memoirs
Figure 1. Piet Hein’s Soma cube. (Online version in colour.)
From the age of 11 he attended the Holt High School for Boys and both teachers and fellow
pupils soon came to recognize him as the school’s mathematical star. Even at that early age
he had decided that he intended to go on to the University of Cambridge to read mathematics,
and in 1956 he realized this ambition and matriculated at Gonville and Caius College.
Cambridge beginnings
As an undergraduate Conway made frequent contributions to the university mathematical
clubs, the New Pythagoreans and the Archimedeans, and conducted his own investigations,
sometimes rather neglecting his official courses.
He collaborated with Mike Guy in classifying all possible solutions to Piet Hein’s Soma
cube (see figure 1), finding that there are precisely 240 distinct ways in which the seven pieces
can be arranged to form a 3 × 3 × 3 cube. They drew a graph, naturally called the Somap,
which had 240 vertices corresponding to the solutions with an edge joining two solutions that
can be obtained one from the other by withdrawing two pieces, twisting and re-inserting them;
it has a single connected component of 239 solutions and one isolated solution. Conway and
Guy also enumerated all 64 convex uniform 4-dimensional Archimedean polytopes during
this period (2)*. He was already at this stage devising a way of classifying all knots with up
to 10 crossings. As always with Conway’s work, notation was paramount: it should contain
all the information required of it in as concise yet transparent a manner as possible. He would
hone it over many iterations until he was satisfied that he had the best possible version.
Conway’s involvement in extracurricular mathematical activities led to him not achieving
the final Tripos results he might have hoped for. Luckily, though, both for John himself
and for mathematics, Christopher Zeeman (FRS 1975) recognized his innate brilliance and
total commitment to the subject by supporting his progression to PhD. He was taken on as a
* Numbers in this form refer to the bibliography at the end of the text.
John Horton Conway 121
research student by the eminent number theorist Harold Davenport FRS, and set to solve the
Waring problem for fifth powers, namely that every integer can be expressed as the sum of
at most 37 fifth powers. It was already proven that every integer could be expressed as the
sum of four squares, nine cubes and 19 fourth powers. Conway completed the proof, which
combined analytic techniques for large integers with ad hoc methods for small numbers, but
he was losing interest in this work. His attention had moved on to infinite numbers and the
work of the German mathematician Cantor, and he submitted a thesis entitled ‘Homogeneous
ordered sets’ (1).
In 1964 Conway became a university lecturer and fellow of Sidney Sussex College. By
this time he had been married to his first wife Eileen for three years and had two young
daughters, Susie and Rosie. I myself joined the college as an undergraduate in that same year
and Conway became my tutor. He was already a colourful character and I have vivid memories
of him striding purposefully across the hallowed lawns of Chapel Court in the snow, his long
hair and gown flowing out behind him, followed by Eileen and a retinue of little girls.
His first PhD student was Adrian Matthias, whom he supervised jointly with Ronald Jensen,
and who himself went on to become a lecturer in logic at Cambridge for five years before
embarking on a fascinating academic career in the South Seas. His second student was Don
Pilling, who had come to Cambridge on a US Navy scholarship and who, on returning to the
States, rose in the navy to the rank of four-star admiral. It was during this period that Conway
produced his first book, Regular algebra (5). It was based faithfully on the notes of Conway’s
lecture course on the topic as recorded by Andrew Glass, then an undergraduate, and on the
doctoral work of Pilling.
By this time, the breadth of Conway’s interest in mathematics and his immense talent were
well-recognized within the department, but he had yet to achieve the resounding success he so
craved. That, though, was about to change!
Conway’s annus mirabilis

The year 1968 saw some of Conway’s most remarkable contributions to mathematics and
transformed his standing within the mathematical community. For this reason he often referred
to it as his ‘annus mirabilis’.
The Conway groups

At this time developments were taking place elsewhere in a branch of mathematics about
which Conway knew almost nothing but which would have a profound influence on his career:
sphere-packing in n-dimensional space. The distance between two points in n-dimensional
Euclidean space is readily defined by extending the familiar 2- and 3-dimensional distances
that follow immediately from Pythagoras’s theorem. Thus, if x = (x1 , x2 , . . . , xn ), and y =
(y1 , y2 , . . . , yn ) are two points in Rn , then d(x, y), the distance between x and y, is defined to
be
d(x, y) = (x1 − y1 )2 + (x2 − y2 )2 + · · · + (xn − yn )2 .
The unit sphere, centre a, can then be defined to be
B(a, 1) = {x ∈ Rn |d(x, a) < 1},

the set of points in Rn whose distance from a is less than 1. The question arises: what
proportion of Rn can be occupied by non-overlapping unit spheres if they are arranged as
efficiently as possible? The answer is straightforward in 2-dimensions, where spheres are
circles, but it is remarkably difficult even in dimension 3. The problem becomes more tractable
if we restrict our attention to lattice packings where the centres of the spheres are placed at
points
{m 1 a1 + m 2 a2 + . . . + m n an |m i ∈ Z},
where {a1 , a2 , . . . , an } is a linearly independent set of n vectors in Rn . However, even with
these more regular packings it can be extremely difficult to prove optimality. Nevertheless,
in 1965 John Leech, a Cambridge mathematician who had moved into computing, produced
a 24-dimensional lattice Λ that afforded a remarkably efficient packing (Leech 1964). It was
based on the famous Mathieu group M24 , which permutes the 24 vectors in the standard basis
of 24-dimensional space, and the associated 12-dimensional binary Golay code, which allows
sign changes on certain subsets of the coordinates (Mathieu 1873; Todd 1966; Curtis 1976).
The group of shape 212 : M24 used to construct Λ has three orbits on the shortest vectors in
the lattice, but the geometry of the lattice suggested to Leech that its full group of symmetries
was much larger. John McKay, who was at the time a PhD student in Edinburgh and who had
met Conway at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow in 1966, thought
the same and set about persuading a leading mathematician to investigate. He approached
Conway and Conway was hooked! In a beautifully elegant piece of work, Conway was able to
produce a further element that preserved the lattice, and so worked out the order of its group
of automorphisms, which was indeed some 107 times larger than the group that had been used
in its construction (3, 4).
The Conway element ξT

In order to define the crucially important Conway element we require a little more detail about
M24 , which acts quintuply transitively as permutations of a 24-element set, Ω say. We may
take {vi | i ∈ Ω} as the standard basis for the vector space in which Λ lies.
Now M24 possesses a conjugacy class of involutions of cycle shape 18 · 28 and the 8-
element fixed point sets thus defined are known as special octads or simply octads. There
are 759 of them and they have the property that any five points of Ω are contained in precisely
one of them; that is to say, they define a Steiner system S (5, 8, 24). It is also the case that the
symmetric difference of two octads that intersect at four points is another octad of the system,
and so any four-point subset of Ω, a tetrad, defines a partition of Ω into six tetrads, the union
of any two of which is an octad. Such a configuration is known as a sextet. The 759 sign
changes on octads generate an elementary Abelian group of order 212 which also preserves
Λ; this is essentially the binary Golay code. We may choose a convenient scaling so that all
vectors in Λ have integral coefficients and the square of the length of any vector is a multiple
of 16. With this scaling, the shortest vectors have squared length 32, and under the action of
the group of shape 212 : M24 used in the construction of Λ the three orbits are
Shape Number Description

24
(42 , 022 ) 2 × 2 = 1104 ±4 in two positions; 0s elsewhere
2
(28 , 016 ) 759 × 27 = 97152 ±2 on an octad with evenly many +2s

(−3, 123 ) 24 × 212 =98304 24 choices for the ±3; 212 of sign changes
Now it is possible to arrange the 24 points of Ω into a 4 × 6 array so that the columns form
a sextet, and such that the symmetric difference of the top row and a column is an octad. Let
T be the first column of such an arrangement, and let the sextet defined by T be {T = T 0 , T 1 ,
. . . , T 5 }, then the Conway element ξ T is defined as

ξT : λi vi → ηi vi ,
i∈Ω i∈Ω
where
η j = λ j − 12 k∈Ti λk for j ∈ Ti , i = 0,

η j = −λ j + 12 k∈T0 λk for j ∈ T0 .
In other words: we take half the sum of the entries in each tetrad from the entries in that
tetrad, and then negate on the initial tetrad T. We then see that
4 4 . . . . −2 2 . . . .
. . . . . . 2 −2 . . . .
ξT : →
. . . . . . 2 −2 . . . .
. . . . . . 2 −2 . . . .
. 2 2 2 2 2 3 1 1 1 1 1
2 . . . . . 1 −1 −1 −1 −1 −1
ξT : → ,
2 . . . . . 1 −1 −1 −1 −1 −1
2 . . . . . 1 −1 −1 −1 −1 −1
thus fusing the three orbits. The resulting group, which he called ·O or ‘dotto’, when factored
by its centre of order 2, was a new simple group. Moreover, it not only involved many of the
recently discovered simple groups, but two of its maximal subgroups were themselves new
simple groups, and so it was that that Co1 , Co2 and Co3 were discovered. John Thompson,
who was rightly regarded as the father of modern group theory, was at the time spending six
months of each year in Cambridge and the other six months in Chicago. It is fair to say that in
the early investigations of the Conway groups, Thompson provided much of the group theory
and Conway provided the geometric insight. Details of all these fascinating groups can be
found in the Atlas of finite groups (18).
The Game of Life

Conway had taken me on as a PhD student in 1968 and so I was present when he made his next
discovery. Using a Go board in the common room of the old Pure Mathematics Department
in Mill Lane, Cambridge, Conway played with the idea of a ‘cellular automaton’ in which
certain of the squares of the board were alive and, at each generation, some would die through
either overcrowding or loneliness, and others would be born. He experimented with various
ideas, usually with a bunch of graduate student onlookers known as ‘kibitzers’. Initially there
were two sexes, A and B, the Actresses and the Bishops, and an empty square that had two of
one and one of the other abutting it would come alive at the next generation. The sex of the
offspring was chosen to rebalance the sexes; so two actresses and a bishop would give birth
to a bishop and vice versa. Eventually Conway realized that the only role the two sexes were
playing was to determine the sex of the offspring and so, as he delighted in telling his future
audiences, ‘I banished sex’. The rules were now beautifully simple:
Figure 2. The glider that recovers its shape every four generations, having moved across the board.
Death: if at time t a live cell has four or more neighbours, then it dies through
overcrowding; if it has zero or one neighbour, then it dies through loneliness.
Birth: an empty square that has precisely three neighbours at time t becomes alive at
time t + 1.
Survival: if a live cell has two or three neighbours, then it stays alive at the next
generation.
These rules led to surprisingly complex growth patterns, and it soon became apparent that
the game, which had by this time been christened ‘The Game of Life’, had outgrown a
19 × 19 Go board. It was the early days of computing, but playing Life became an
absolute must for budding programmers. In 1970 Martin Gardner devoted his ‘Recreational
mathematics’ column in Scientific American to Life and from then on it spread like wildfire
around the world (Gardner 1970). It is estimated that millions of hours of precious computing
time were spent, often illicitly, playing Life. Experiments in Cambridge, starting with various
configurations, and usually grew rapidly, before collapsing leaving bits of debris scattered
around the board. For this reason Conway had, in Gardner’s column, offered a prize of US$50
to anyone who could produce a configuration that they could show would grow indefinitely.
By this time, Richard Guy, the father of Mike and a co-author with Conway of Winning ways
(13), had noticed a small configuration of five living cells that would recover its original shape
after four generations, having moved diagonally southeast across the board. They called such a
configuration a glider; it is shown in figure 2, where cells about to die are denoted by black dots
and those about to give birth by circles. In 1970 Bill Gosper at MIT produced a configuration
that shot off a glider every 30 generations, returning to its original shape. This glider gun
clearly increased the population by five every 30 generations, thus winning the $50, which,
much to Conway’s relief, Scientific American paid.
This discovery was precisely what Conway was looking for as it confirmed that Life
could be made to mimic a Turing machine and so had an important mathematical role in
computational science as a cellular automaton.
Much though Conway loved The Game of Life, in his later years he came to worry that
it would be the main thing he was remembered for. While this may well be true among the
general public—I recently heard a question on BBC TV’s University Challenge ‘Who was the
British inventor of The Game of Life?’—this is certainly not true in the world of mathematics,
where Conway’s contributions are legion.
The surreal numbers

Conway’s third discovery during this purple patch in his early career brought together his
long-standing fascination for transfinite numbers and mathematical games, and made evident
a connection between these two areas that few would have suspected. He was familiar with
the Grundy–Sprague theory of impartial games (see Sprague 1935; Grundy 1939), which are
impartial in the sense that the same moves are available to both players. Indeed, he extends
the notion of nim addition, which is crucial in developing a winning strategy when playing
such games, to nim multiplication. This leads to a nested sequence of finite fields of orders
2, 4, 16, 256, . . . defined on the natural numbers (including 0). However, his general theory
of numbers and games (8) concerns games in which the options open to the two players Left
and Right may differ.
Since the word ‘partial’ is somewhat ambiguous, Conway and Guy chose to call such games
partisan; but it is a subset of these partisan games that most delighted Conway. He called them
‘Numbers’, but Donald Knuth (ForMemRS 2003; the creator of the TeX/LaTeX package in
which the majority of modern mathematical papers are written) was so taken with the concept
that he wrote a novel featuring them, which he entitled Surreal numbers (Knuth 1974). The
name stuck and is now generally accepted.
Conway’s construction combines two approaches: Dedekind’s method of building the real
numbers out of the rationals Q by dividing Q into two subsets L and R such that no member of
L is greater than any member of R—a Dedekind cut; and Cantor’s construction of the ordinal
numbers where he counts up to ω, the first infinite ordinal, and then carries on counting.
Conway’s notation for a partisan game is
x = {L | R},
where L denotes all the positions to which player Left can move and R denotes all the positions
to which Right can move. A notion of ordering ≥ is introduced and a game x is defined to be
a surreal number if, and only if, all options in xL and xR are themselves surreal numbers and
no inequality of the form xL ≥ xR holds. Starting on day 0 with just {|} = 0, we then obtain
{0| } = 1 and { |0} = −1 on day 1,

1 1
{ |−1} = −2, {1| } = 2, {0|1} = and {−1|0} = − on day 2,
2 2
and so on. After a finite number of days only fractions with a power of 2 in the denominator
are formed, but on the ωth day the usual rational and irrational numbers come tumbling out,
accompanied by many weird numbers, including infinitesimals such as ω1 , which we have
never seen before.
The basic arithmetic operations are defined inductively by
x + y = {x L + y, x + y L |x R + y, x + y R }
−x = {−x R | − x L }
x y = {x L y + x y L − x L y L , x R y + x y R − x R y R |
x L y + x y R − x L y R , x R y + x y L − x R y L },
it being assumed that the operations hold for all options of x and y. Conway proved that
these operations make the class of surreal numbers into a field. Throughout his later life he
considered this construction to be his most important discovery and lived in hope that the
surreal numbers would eventually gain the universal recognition that they deserve; I for one
hope that he was right!
The ‘Atlas’ of finite groups

Conway directed me to investigate the subgroup structure of ·O and the underlying geometry
of Λ as my PhD project. I soon realized that this necessitated a deep familiarity with the
Mathieu group M24 , and so I set about trying to arrange the 24 points of Ω in such a way that
the octads could be easily recognized. It was, in fact, in a pub called the Cricketers’ Arms
whilst enjoying a beer with a non-mathematical friend that I realized that the whole Steiner
system could be encapsulated in 35 small diagrams. The next day I presented these diagrams
to Conway, who was delighted and immediately took over the production of a master copy.
We wanted to draw on graph paper but did not want the lines to show up, so we needed a
glass-topped table with a light underneath on which we could place the paper upside down.
In the absence of such a table Conway removed the sliding window from the librarian’s office
and placed it between two chairs. An anglepoise lamp in a litterbin provided the lighting. In
this way we worked into the evening, when Richard Guy appeared and suggested that we
should pick up some wine and finish the job off in the guest room of Caius College, where
he was staying with his wife Louise. A merry time was had by all, and we finished the task
in the early hours. The next day I cycled around to a printer and had a couple of hundred
copies run off. Shrunk down to a quarter the size of the original, all the blemishes due to our
shaky hands and general inebriation miraculously disappeared. Fun was had deciding what we
should call this device, but eventually we settled on the ‘Miracle Octad Generator’, and MOG
it has remained ever since. It proved immensely useful in working with all things associated
with the Leech lattice and has subsequently made an important contribution to working on
other sporadic simple groups, including the largest Janko group J4 (see Benson 1980).
Conway resigned from Sidney Sussex College in 1970, as he considered that the election of
the new master had been conducted improperly. He returned as a Fellow to his undergraduate
college, Gonville and Caius, and was a Life Fellow there ever after.
In 1972 he accepted an invitation to spend a year at the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena, and he took me with him as his graduate research assistant. It was during this time
that he worked with David Wales on constructing the Rudvalis group. Much was known about
this group, including its order, class list and, indeed, its full character table, but it had never
been proved to exist. To do this it was necessary to construct it as matrices or permutations,
and a number of people were attempting to do so. For Conway, the race was on! I was living
with him and his family at the time—he and Eileen now had four daughters, Susie, Rosie,
Ellie and Annie, who were aged 9, 8, 6 and 3 respectively—and so every evening I would
hear about progress that had been made, and be treated to the innovative notation that Conway
had invented. Eventually they were successful, and Conway announced the precise date and
time at which existence was formally proved (7).
All this working with finite groups and, in particular, with newly discovered sporadic
simple groups, had made Conway aware of the fact that there was no single source of
information about particular groups. He determined that he would provide such a reference
book (18). It was to be called an ‘atlas’, as the various infinite families were to play the
role of continents, and from there one could home in on a particular country or group within
that family; the sporadic groups were, of course, islands and some, as we now know, formed
archipelagos. He obtained a grant from the then Science Research Council and, on our return
from the USA, took me on as his research fellow. Much of the work was carried out in my
office, which became known as Atlantis, and when we had produced a fair copy of, say, a
character table we would print it on Atlantic blue paper and place it in the recently acquired
‘guard book’, a massive tome that expanded to accommodate vast quantities of material (the
original manuscript of the Atlas still exists and is to find a permanent home in the archive of
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge). We made early decisions about, for instance, what
information would be included in the character tables. We included power maps, which told
you what class the pth power of an element x lay in, for every prime p dividing the order of x.
We also included the Frobenius–Schur indicator for each of the irreducible characters, which
told you whether the underlying representation could be written over the real numbers (+1),
required complex numbers but the character values were all real (−1), or the character itself
involved complex numbers (o). These additions proved immensely useful as they often led
us to recognize errors in the tables we inherited from other sources, and enabled us to correct
them.
After a relatively short time we found that we had been joined by a third member, Simon
Norton, who had simply gravitated to our project. Norton was a phenomenally talented young
mathematician who had obtained a first class degree from London University while still at
school and had successfully represented the UK in the International Mathematical Olympiad
on three occasions. We soon came to recognize the huge contribution he was making and
invited him to become a co-author.
This was the early days of mathematical computing and, if we needed some computation
done for us, we would go along to see Mike Guy in the Maths Lab, as the department housing
the Titan computer was called. These forays would generally occur in the early hours of the
morning when Mike could be relied upon to be there. Much work had been done on the
Atlas, but the enormity of the project was becoming increasingly apparent. Initially Conway
had intended that it would incorporate all groups, in some sense, but we came to realize that
we should have to concentrate on simple groups. Moreover, I was coming to the end of my
fellowship and was seeking jobs elsewhere, so another co-author and especially one with
computing skills was desperately needed.
Richard Parker fitted the bill perfectly. It is fair to say that he was an amateur mathematician
at that time in the sense that he would work for three months of the year writing till
programs for department stores, indeed he was one of the first people to write programs
that enabled the whole retail operation to be run from the till. He would then spend the
other nine months of the year doing mathematics unpaid. Checking mechanically that, for
instance, a particular table satisfied the orthogonality relations was child’s play to Parker, and
he did a great deal of work constructing and decomposing matrix representations of groups
using his so-called Meataxe. Further important computing assistance was provided by John
Thackray.
The fifth co-author to join the atlas project was Robert Wilson, who had become a master
of the art of working out lists of maximal subgroups of simple groups (see for instance Wilson
1983). Two of the most important pieces of information available in the Atlas are the character
tables and the maximal subgroups, and Wilson was responsible for providing many of the
latter. He would also have checked, and sometimes corrected, lists of maximal subgroups that
already existed. Gathering together all the accumulated information and organizing it into a
publishable form was in large part due to Wilson.
The introduction to the Atlas, which not only explains the notation used, but also contains
a wonderfully concise description of the infinite families of groups, was written by Conway.
Figure 3 is a photograph of the five Atlas authors at the ‘Atlas 10 Years On’ conference held in
Figure 3. The Atlas authors: Conway, Curtis, Norton, Parker and Wilson. (Photographer unknown.)
(Online version in colour.)
Birmingham in 1985. In the foreground is a cake designed to look like the big red book which
is the Atlas.
Sphere-packing, lattices and groups

As well as awakening in him a great interest in sporadic simple groups, Conway’s discovery
of the three groups named after him also took him into the world of sphere-packing. His main
collaborator in this area was Neil Sloane, who made frequent visits to Cambridge during the
late 1970s and early 1980s. They wrote numerous papers together and formed a remarkably
productive team. They were also both tireless workers, taking as their motto ‘go as far as any
reasonable man will go, and then go a lot further’. I recall having a meal with Conway and his
first wife Eileen at which he criticized obsessive people. Eileen replied: ‘What are you talking
about? You’ve been doing mathematics for 16 hours a day every day for the last two weeks.’
One sphere-packing problem is that of finding the covering radius of a lattice packing.
We ask what is the smallest radius r such that closed balls of radius r centred at the lattice
points completely cover n-dimensional space? Or, to put it another way, what is the greatest
distance a point in n-dimensional space can be from a lattice point? This can be solved by
classifying all deepest holes in the lattice: that is to say points of n-dimensional space such
that moving in any direction takes you nearer to a lattice point. In a remarkable piece of
work, Conway and Sloane, together with Richard Parker, classified all the deepest holes in the
Figure 4. Conway and Sloane in Caius College library celebrating their discovery. (Artwork by Joanna
Naddeo. Used with permission from the artist.) (Online version in colour.)
24-dimensional Leech lattice Λ (10, 12). This was one of those delightful occasions when, not
only has the problem under consideration been solved, but the result is unexpectedly beautiful.
An integral lattice in Rn is said to be unimodular if it has determinant ±1, and it is even if the
norm of every vector (that is the square of its length) is an even integer. Niemeier classified
such lattices in 24-dimensions (Niemeier 1973), finding that there are 24 of them. It turned
out that there are precisely 23 types of deepest hole in Λ; they correspond to the other 23
Niemeier lattices in dimension 24 in the following sense: if we take the deep hole as origin O,
then the sublattice spanned by the vectors from O to the nearest points of Λ span one of the
Niemeier lattices, and all 23 occur in this manner. Conway and Sloane completed this work in
the Gonville and Caius College library and celebrated their achievement by singing together
‘Holey, holey, holey, . . . ’. This happy event is recorded in an artist’s impression (see figure 4),
which now hangs in the college.
Another fine achievement of the duo was the concept of laminated lattices (11, 15), which
produces dense packings by induction on the degree. As Sloane recalls: ‘You take the densest
packing in a certain dimension and proceed to stack layers of such spheres in the densest way
possible to obtain a packing in the next highest dimension.’ They obtained a unique lattice
packing out to dimension 10, and were able to pursue this construction up to 48-dimensions,
although things become wild after dimension 25. They did show, though, that there is a unique
laminated lattice in dimension 24; it is of course the wonderful Leech lattice. As stated earlier,
the Leech lattice was originally of interest because it provides a strikingly efficient way of
packing spheres in 24-dimensional space. In a remarkable piece of work, Viazovska and
colleagues showed recently that it, in fact, provides the optimal unrestricted packing (Cohn et
al. 2017; Viazovska 2017).
Conway left Cambridge in 1986 to take up the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics
at Princeton University. He had divorced his first wife Eileen and was now married to Larissa
Queen, with whom he wrote a number of papers and with whom he had two sons: Alex, born
in 1983, and Oliver, born in 1988. He and Sloane were now on the same continent and their
collaboration continued apace. They wrote 50 articles together, and in 1988 brought much
of their work together in the monumental Sphere-packing, lattices and groups (SPLAG) (20),
which contains a mind-boggling amount of information. Several of the papers cited here are
reproduced in this extraordinary book, along with a bibliography containing more than 1500
references. One reviewer wrote of SPLAG: ‘This book is the best survey of the best work in
one of the best fields of combinatorics written by the best people. It will make the best reading
for the best students interested in the best mathematics that is now going on.’ (Rota 1990)
Other group constructions, the Monster and Moonshine

Although Conway continued to make substantial contributions to a wide range of
mathematical topics, he retained an overweening interest in sporadic simple groups. Soon
after Conway had discovered his three groups, Bernd Fischer used an entirely new approach
and himself discovered a further three sporadic simple groups. The product of two distinct
transpositions in the symmetric group Sn has order either 2 or 3. Fischer wondered if
there were further interesting groups that had a class of involutions with this property, and
his investigations revealed three more groups. These are labelled Fi22 , Fi23 and Fi24 , and
are termed 3-transpositions groups (Fischer 1971). In fact the largest, Fi24 , is not simple,
but its derived subgroup, the subgroups generated by its commutators, is simple; thus the
3-transpositions do not lie in the simple group, which is of course the case with the symmetric
groups. It turned out that these groups were also closely related to the Mathieu groups in that
both ·O and Fi24 contained maximal subgroups that consisted of an elementary Abelian group
of order 212 extended by M24 ; however, whereas in the Conway case, the elementary Abelian
group was a copy of the Golay code and the extension was split, in the Fischer case it was the
dual of the code and the extension was non-split. This meant, though, that the techniques we
had developed for working with the Conway groups were often useful in this new context (6).
Fischer now extended his investigations to groups containing a class of involutions where
products of order 4 were allowed. This led to the so-called Baby Monster B, which has order
around 4 × 1033 . Generalizing to further product orders, Fischer hypothesized that there was
a much larger group which, if it existed, would be the Monster M—names that were coined
by Conway.
At the same time, Bob Griess was also predicting the existence of this massive new group
(see Griess 1976, 1982), and eventually he announced that he had constructed it. The Monster
weighs in with some 8 × 1053 elements, but it is not its order alone that gives rise to the
name. After all, each of the infinite families has members as large as you like, and the
smallest member of the E8 family, which is E8 (2) is much larger than M. However, every
classical or Chevalley group has a representation as permutations or matrices, which is small
in comparison with its size. Even the massive E8 (2) can be represented as 248 × 248 matrices.
But the smallest dimension in which M can be represented is 196 883, and the lowest (faithful)
permutation representation as permutations is on some 1020 letters.
Conway produced a simplified construction of M (17), and determined to understand where
the group came from. An important development in this direction came with the investigation
of the so-called Y-diagrams (19). The projective plane of order 3 consists of 13 points and
13 lines, each consisting of four points, such that every pair of points lie together on a unique
line, and every two lines intersect at a unique point. You can draw a bipartite graph with
26 nodes, the points and lines, in which each line is joined to the four points that lie on it. It
turns out that if you interpret the 26 vertices of this graph as involutions, which commute if
they are disjoint and have product of order 3 if they are joined, then the resulting group has the
wreath product M wr 2, the so-called Bimonster, as a homomorphic image. Many subgroups
of this configuration are described in the Atlas (18), together with defining relations (see p.
232).
The next development again involved John McKay, who had originally pointed Conway at
the Leech lattice. He had noticed that the power series expansion of an important function in
number theory had a coefficient close to the minimal irreducible degree of M. Specifically, the
modular function j has q-expansion given by
1
j (τ ) = + 744 + 196 884q + 21 493 760q 2 + 864 299 970q 3 + · · · ,
q
where q = e2πiτ , and McKay pointed out to Conway, Thompson and others that the coefficient
of q was just one more than the degree of the lowest-dimensional representation of M. Initially
this observation was dismissed as a numerological fluke, but when it became clear that the
other coefficients were also simple numerical combinations of the irreducible degrees of M,
people realized that something deep was going on. Conway coined the expression ‘Monstrous
Moonshine’ to describe the unexplained connection with number theory, and he and Norton
conjectured a link between M and elliptic modular functions (9).
At this point Richard Borcherds (FRS 1994), a former PhD student of Conway’s, joined the
fray and, in an extraordinary piece of work in which he linked the Monster, elliptic curves and
string theory through vertex algebras, he verified the Moonshine conjectures. For this profound
breakthrough, Borcherds was awarded the Fields Medal. He recalls: ‘I consider Conway’s
calculation of the automorphism group of the 26-dimensional Lorentzian lattice Π 1,25 [(14)
and (16)] to be one of his deepest and most fundamental results: it underlies several areas such
as monstrous moonshine and infinite-dimensional generalized Kac-Moody algebras. Most of
my published papers depend in some way on this result of Conway’s which shows that the
automorphism group of Π 1,25 is the product of −1 and an extension R.Λ.Aut(Λ), where R is
the refection group, Λ is the Leech lattice, and Aut(Λ) is the Conway group.’ This space has
25 space-like coordinates and one time-like coordinate and so the norm of
(x0 , x1 , . . . , x24 | t)
is
x02 + x12 + · · · + x24
2
− t 2.
The vector u = (0, 1, 2, . . . , 24 | 70), which appears on the sixtieth birthday cake in
figure 6, thus has length 0 since the sum of the first 24 squares is itself a perfect square,
namely 702 (this is the only occasion on which the sum of the squares of the first n > 1 integers
is itself a perfect square). The integral vectors in its factored orthogonal complement u⊥ / <u>
is a copy of the Leech lattice. Borcherds goes on to state that Conway’s result explains how,
below dimension 26, lattices are somehow manageable, but that beyond that point things ‘go
wild’. ‘For example, the even, positive definite, unimodular lattices consist of 1 in dimension
8, 2 in dimension 16, 24 in dimension 24, but more than a billion in dimension 32.’
While being delighted and impressed by what Borcherds had done, Conway was not
entirely satisfied. I believe he still wanted a more geometric explanation for the existence
of M.
Recreational mathematics
The common room in the old Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in
Mill Lane was Conway’s domain. In fact he spent very little time in his office and preferred
to be in the common room, working, talking about mathematics and playing games. The latter
of course included The Game of Life, which has been mentioned above, but another game
invented at that time was also played on a Go board. It later became known as ‘Phutball’,
an abbreviation for ‘Philosopher’s football’, and I spent many hours playing it with him. It
consisted of a single black counter, the ball, placed at an intersection, and a move consisted
of either placing a white counter on any unoccupied intersection, or picking up the ball and
jumping over as many adjacent (white) players in any direction. The object was to get the ball
over your opponent’s try line. It was generally played in front of a number of kibitzers, who
would call out ‘Make the American move’ or the ‘Chinese move’, terminology which would
probably not be politically correct these days.
Another pastime that deserves to be preserved was Besicovitch’s game. It was based on a
traditional Russian game called Svoyi Kosiri, in which your hand of playing cards is concealed
from the other player(s), but Besicovitch had modified it so that it became a chess-like two-
person game in which all the cards were laid face upwards on the table. Conway played this
game with Besicovitch, and I spent a great deal of time playing with Conway. It was a subtle
and fascinating game, which was subjected to serious analysis.
Some games, such as ‘Sprouts and Brussels Sprouts’, even made it into Martin Gardner’s
column in Scientific American and, believe it or not, they were invariably approached in
a scholarly and respectful manner! The evidence for this assertion is, of course, Conway’s
discovery of surreal numbers, which came directly from his interest in games theory.
Conway had come to know a large number of games theorists over the years, including
Elwyn Berlekamp, who had investigated the familiar ‘dots and boxes’ children’s game,
Martin Gardner and Richard Guy. When we visited Caltech in 1972, Conway spent time with
Solomon Golomb, who, in 1965, had written the book Polyominoes (Golomb 1996), and in
fact had coined the name. I recall Conway and myself spending some time trying to decide
whether a heptomino consisting of a strip of length 5 with two further squares placed above
the second and third squares of the strip was a rectile in the terminology of Golomb. That is
to say, could one tile a finite rectangle out of such polyominoes. Semi-infinite rectangles were
easy, but the finite problem was difficult to disprove. The three of us at lunch one day noticed
that our names could be made to rhyme as Johnway Conway, Roburtis Curtis and Solomon
Golomon— and among certain gamers those silly names stuck.
Figure 5. Berlekamp, Conway and Guy: the authors of Winning ways. Photograph taken by Klaus
Peters in Phoenix, AZ, USA in 2004. (Online version in colour.)
The culmination of Conway’s contribution to recreational mathematics came with the

publication, with co-authors Berlekamp and Guy, of the delightful Winning ways for your
mathematical plays (13). Whereas On numbers and games (8) concentrates on the rigorous
mathematical implications of the original inductive definitions, Winning ways is more
concerned with actually playing the myriad mathematical games that it describes. Figure 5
shows the three authors, all of whom sadly died within 12 months of one another, celebrating
the publication of this ground-breaking book.
More recent work and the Free Will theorem

Moving to Princeton in 1986, Conway soon set about establishing his domain in the common
room, much as it had been in Cambridge. Colleagues in his new department remarked that
John’s playful approach to mathematics had re-established a long-lost atmosphere. He had left
his group theory colleagues behind in England, but his collaboration with Sloane blossomed
and became even more productive (20).
John and Larissa’s marriage ended in 1992 and John entered a very low period, during
which he made a suicide attempt. He did not try to conceal this event and, in fact, would
often refer to it in lectures to large numbers of people, clearly feeling that this was the best
Figure 6. Conway’s sixtieth birthday cake at the Isaac Newton Institute (photograph by the author).
way of coping with it. He also suffered serious health problems, including a heart attack,
which required a triple bypass, and a number of strokes. He had, though, made some good
friends at Princeton, including Bill Thurston, who introduced him to his orbifold notation
for representing types of symmetry groups. Conway was very taken with the elegance of
this approach and thereafter frequently lectured on it. He had always been a charismatic and
inspirational lecturer at Cambridge, and this continued at Princeton. Jane Gilman recalls the
electricity generated when she was teaching a course entitled ‘Geometry and the imagination’
together with John Conway, Bill Thurston and Peter Doyle.
Conway entered into another long-term relationship at this time and seemed very happy.
That too ended, though, and in around 1997 he met his third wife-to-be, Diana, with whom he
has a son, Gareth, born in 2001. Although John and Diana separated in 2008, she lived close
by and remained in close contact with him. Both Diana and Gareth were very supportive when
John’s health finally broke down in recent years.
Throughout his life Conway had retained his great interest in number theory and in 1998
published The sensual (quadratic) form (21). In 1993, in an unpublished piece of work, he and
A. Schneeberger had proved what they called the 15 theorem, which states that if a positive
definite quadratic form with integer matrix represents all positive integers up to 15, then
it represents all positive integers. Conway conjectured that a similar result would hold for
integral quadratic forms. In 2000 Manjul Bhargava (FRS 2019) produced a shorter proof of
the 15 theorem (Bhargava 2000) and in 2005 announced that Conway’s conjecture was true,
with the number 15 replaced by 290.
In 2003 Conway and Derek Smith published On quaternions and octonions (22). Further
mathematical stimulation and collaboration was furnished during his Princeton years by the
weekly visits of Alex Ryba, who had been a student of Thompson’s in Cambridge but was now
working at Queen’s College, New York. Together they discovered and re-discovered many
beautiful results of a geometric and combinatorial nature, including the so-called ‘mysticum
hexagrammaticum’, which arises out of Pascal’s six points on a conic section (25, 26).
Perhaps the more recent work for which Conway is best known is his collaboration with
Simon Kochen on what is called the ‘Free Will theorem’ (23, 24). This saw an extraordinary
move for Conway into the world of theoretical physics and, one might say, the boundaries with
philosophy. The theorem states that if we have free will in the sense that our choices are not
dictated by the past, in other words are not deterministic, then, subject to certain assumptions,
so must some elementary particles. The proof takes three axioms that would be accepted as
holding by many physicists, and rigorously deduces that the theorem follows. In the later of
the two papers cited here Conway & Kochen weaken one of the axioms, so strengthening the
theorem. Conway lectured on this theorem to large audiences around the world, including a
guest lecture to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 2005.
Conclusion
As we have seen, Conway made substantial contributions to many branches of mathematics,
including logic, algebra, number theory, combinatorics and geometry, which is an exceptional
achievement in this day and age. He was, moreover, a great popularizer of the discipline
and his open lectures invariably drew large audiences. Indeed, his frequent contributions to
Martin Gardner’s column ‘Recreational mathematics’ in Scientific American (see Gardner
1970), introduced him to a much larger public and resulted in him being well-known outside
the world of mathematics. Figure 6 shows the cake that was designed for his sixtieth birthday
conference held at the Isaac Newton Institute in 1997 (I sent a diagram of the cake through
to Fitzbillies, the celebrated bakery on Trumpington Street, and they faithfully reproduced
all the mathematical symbols in icing). It attempts to illustrate the wide range of Conway’s
interests from the Waring problem for fifth powers, to transfinite numbers, to geometry in
26-dimensional Lorentz space. Plus, of course, several mathematical games! To Conway
mathematics itself was always a game, and correspondingly he found a great deal of serious
mathematics in the games he played. This playful attitude to our demanding discipline meant
that, while he was always working, he was never labouring, because there was nothing he
would prefer to be doing. His infectious enthusiasm for the subject persuaded students and
colleagues alike that mathematics was fun. Figure 7 shows Conway at the same conference
explaining his most recent work to the Abel prize winner Jean-Pierre Serre ForMemRS.
Such was Conway’s fame during his lifetime that a biography of him, see (Roberts 2015),
has already appeared. This tribute has highlighted three enormous tomes, The Atlas, SPLAG
and Winning ways, and made reference to a number of other books, see (5, 8, 21, 22). Conway
himself could be rather scathing about what he called ‘scholarship’, which to him meant the
methodical gathering and regurgitating of facts. None of his books falls remotely into that
category. They all approach the subject under consideration in a fresh and revealing manner,
and contain large amounts of original material.
Figure 7. Conway with J.-P. Serre at the JHC60 conference in the INI. (Photograph by the author.)
The Conway biography (Roberts 2015) gives many details of Conway’s personal life. It
makes it clear that his wandering eye and total commitment to mathematics made him difficult
to live with. Indeed, all three of his marriages and a further long-term relationship ended in
divorce or separation, although, as has been mentioned above, his third wife Diana remained
in close contact with him to the end of his life. In fact she has done an important service to
mathematics by sorting through his voluminous papers and preserving important documents.
I myself have no doubt that he loved all of his children deeply, but it was sometimes difficult
for the older ones to accept that his work would always take precedence over spending time
with them. Sacrifices were undoubtedly made, but the world of mathematics is hugely richer
for the wonderful legacy that he left to us all.
Over the course of his career John Conway was awarded numerous prizes and accolades.
He was awarded the London Mathematical Society’s Berwick Prize (1971) and the Polya Prize
(1987), Northwestern University’s Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and the American
Mathematical Society’s Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000). He was
elected Fellow of the Royal Society (1981) and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (1992).
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the following mathematicians who contributed to this memoir: Richard Borcherds,
Conway’s most distinguished former student, who regards Conway’s calculation of the automorphism group of the
26-dimensional Lorentzian lattice Π 1,25 as being at the root of much of his own subsequent work; Simon Kochen,
who together with Conway formulated the Free Will theorem; John McKay, who introduced Conway to the Leech
lattice and so instigated much of what followed; Alex Ryba, who was a constant support to Conway during his later
years at Princeton; and Neil Sloane, who was a prolific co-author with Conway and himself a meticulous scholar.
Sloane kindly provided the photograph of Berlekamp, Conway and Guy at the launch of Winning ways on the Online
Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences website; see figure 5. The portrait photograph was provided to the Royal Society
by the subject; the photographer and copyright status are unknown.
Author profile
Robert Turner Curtis
Robert Curtis was John Conway’s student, both as an undergraduate at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from 1964
to 1967 and then as one of his first PhD students, receiving his degree in 1972. He worked with Conway on the Atlas
of finite groups for four years and then spent three years as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College, Maine, USA. On
his return to the UK he worked at the University of Birmingham, becoming a professor in 1998. He retired in 2010
after 30 years’ service. Following retirement he became treasurer of the London Mathematical Society for nine years.
His research reflects one side of Conway’s interests, namely the sporadic simple groups and the combinatorial
structures on which they act. His most recent work involves a novel way of constructing many of these objects by
way of what he terms ‘symmetric generation of groups’.
References to other authors

Benson, D. 1980 The simple group J4, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.
Bhargava, M. 2000 On the Conway–Scheenberger 15 theorem. Contemp. Math. 272, 27–37. (doi:10.1090/conm/
272/04395)
Cohn, H., Kumar, A., Miller, S. D., Radchenko, D. & Viazovska, M. 2017 The sphere-packing problem in dimension
24. Ann. Math. 185, 1017–1033. (doi:10.4007/annals.2017.185.3.8)
Curtis, R. T. 1976 A new combinatorial approach to M24 . Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 79, 25–42.
(doi:10.1017/S0305004100052075)
Fischer, B. 1971 Finite groups generated by 3-transpositions. I. Invent. Math. 13, 232–246. (doi:10.1007/BF01404633)
Gardner, M. 1970 Recreational mathematics: the fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new Solitaire game ‘Life’.
Scient. Am. 223, 120–123. (doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1070-120)
Golomb, S. W. 1996 Polyominoes, 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Griess, R. L., Jr. 1976 The structure of the ‘Monster’ simple group. In Proceedings of the Conference
on Finite Groups (ed. W. R. Scott & F. Gross), pp. 113–118. New York, NY: Academic Press.
(doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-633650-4.50016-3)
Griess, R. L., Jr. 1982 The friendly giant. Inventiones Math. 69, 1–102. (doi:10.1007/BF01389186)
Grundy, P. M. 1939 Mathematics and games. Eureka 2, 6–8.
Knuth, D. E. 1974 Surreal numbers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional.
Leech, J. 1964 Some sphere packings in higher space. Can. J. Math. 16, 657–682. (doi:10.4153/CJM-1964-065-1)
Mathieu, E. 1873 Sur les fonctions cinq fois transitives de 24 quantités. J. Math. Pure Appl. 18, 25–46.
Niemeier, H.-V. 1973 Definite quadratische formen der dimension 24 und diskriminante 1. J. Numb. Theory 5,
142–178. (doi:10.1016/0022-314X(73)90068-1)
Roberts, S. 2015 Genius at play: the curious mind of John Horton Conway. London, New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Rota, G.-C. 1990 Review: Sphere packings, lattices and groups: J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane, Springer, 1988,
663 pp. Adv. Math. 84, 1–136.
Sprague, R. P. 1935 Uber mathematische Kampfspiele. Tôhoku Math. J. 41, 438–444.
Todd, J. A. 1966 A representation of the Mathieu group M24 as a collineation group. Ann. Matematica Pura Appl. 71,
199–238. (doi:10.1007/BF02413742)
Viazovska, M. 2017 The sphere packing problem in dimension 8. Ann. Math. 185, 991–1015. (doi:10.4007/annals.
2017.185.3.7)
Wilson, R. A. 1983 The maximal subgroups of Conway’s group Co1 . J. Algebra, 144–165. (doi:10.1016/0021-
8693(83)90122-9)
Bibliography
The following publications are those referred to directly in the text. A full bibliography is available as electronic
supplementary material at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5760688.
(1) 1964 Homogeneous ordered sets. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.

(2) 1965 (With M. J. Guy) Four-dimensional Archimedean polytopes. In Proc. Colloq. Convexity at
Copenhagen. Copenhagen, Denmark: Københavns Universitets Matematiske Institut.
(3) 1969 A characterisation of Leech’s lattice. Invent. Math. 7, 137–142. (doi:10.1007/BF01389796)
(4) A group of order 8,315,553,613,086,720,000. Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 1, 79–88. (doi:10.1112/blms/
1.1.79)
(5) 1971 Regular algebra and finite machines. London, UK: Chapman and Hall.
(6) 1973 A construction of the smallest Fischer group F22 . In Finite groups: Proc, Gainesville Conf. Finite
Groups, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 23–24 March 1972 (ed. T. M. Gagen, M. P. Hale & E.
E. Shult), pp. 27–35. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North Holland.
(7) (With D. B. Wales) Construction of the Rudvalis group of order 145,926,144,000. J. Algebra 27,
538–548. (doi:10.1016/0021-8693(73)90063-X)
(8) 1976 On numbers and games. London, UK: Academic Press.
(9) 1979 (With S. P. Norton) Monstrous Moonshine. Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 11, 308–339. (doi:10.1112/
blms/11.3.308)
(10) 1982 (With R. Parker & N. J. A. Sloane) The covering radius of the Leech lattice. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A
380, 261–290. (doi:10.1098/rspa.1982.0042)
(11) (With N. J. A. Sloane) Laminated lattices. Ann. Math. 116, 593–620. (doi:10.2307/2007025)
(12) (With N. J. A. Sloane) Twenty-three constructions for the Leech lattice. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 381,
275–283. (doi:10.1098/rspa.1982.0071)
(13) (With E. R. Berlekamp & R. K. Guy) Winning ways for your mathematical plays. London, UK:
Academic Press.
(14) 1983 The automorphism group of the 26-dimensional even unimodular Lorentz lattice. J. Algebra 80,
159–163. (doi:10.1016/0021-8693(83)90025-X)
(15) (With N. J. A. Sloane) Complex and integral laminated lattices. Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 280, 463–490.
(doi:10.1090/S0002-9947-1983-0716832-0)
(16) 1984 (With R. E. Borcherds, L. Queen & N. J. A. Sloane) A monster Lie algebra? Adv. Math. 53, 75–79.
(doi:10.1016/0001-8708(84)90018-5)
(17) 1985 A simple construction of the Fischer–Griess Monster group. Invent. Math. 79,
513–540. (doi:10.1007/BF01388521)
(18) (With R. T. Curtis, S. P. Norton, R. A. Parker & R. A. Wilson) An atlas of finite groups. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
(19) (With L. H. Soicher) The Bimonster, the group y555 , and the projective plane of order 3. In Computers
in Algebra Conf., Linz, Austria (ed. B. F. Caviness). Springer.
(20) 1988 (With N. J. A. Sloane) Sphere-packing, lattices and groups. London, UK: Springer-Verlag.
(21) 1998 (With F. Y. C. Fung) The sensual (quadratic) form. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of
America.
(22) 2003 (With D. Smith) On quaternions and octonions: their geometry, arithmetic and symmetry. Boca Raton,
FL: A. K. Peters, CRC Press.
(23) 2006 (With S. Kochen) The Free Will theorem. Found. Phys. 36, 1441–1473. (doi:10.1007/
s10701-006-9068-6)
(24) 2009 (With S. Kochen) The strong Free Will theorem. Not. Am. Math. Soc. 56, 226–232.
(25) 2012 (With A. Ryba) The Pascal Mysticum demystified. Math. Intel. 34, 4–5. (doi:10.1007/
s00283-012-9301-4)
(26) 2013 (With A. Ryba) Extending the Pascal Mysticum. Math. Intel. 35, 44–45. (doi:10.1007/
s00283-012-9351-7)

RSBM 2021 0034

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

RSBM 2021 0034

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Downloaded from https://royalsocietypublishing.

org/ on 21 April 2023

JOHN HORTON CONWAY

Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. 72, 117–138 (2022)

26 December 1937 — 11 April 2020

Elected FRS 1981

By Robert Turner Curtis*

School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,

The early years

2021 The Author(s)

Figure 1. Piet Hein’s Soma cube. (Online version in colour.)

Conway’s annus mirabilis

The Conway groups

The unit sphere, centre a, can then be defined to be

B(a, 1) = {x ∈ Rn |d(x, a) < 1},

The Conway element ξT

Shape Number Description

(28 , 016 ) 759 × 27 = 97152 ±2 on an octad with evenly many +2s

The Game of Life

The surreal numbers

{0| } = 1 and { |0} = −1 on day 1,

The ‘Atlas’ of finite groups

Sphere-packing, lattices and groups

Other group constructions, the Monster and Moonshine

The culmination of Conway’s contribution to recreational mathematics came with the

More recent work and the Free Will theorem

References to other authors

(1) 1964 Homogeneous ordered sets. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.

You might also like