It is with great sadness that the London Mathematical Society (LMS) reports the death of John Horton Conway who was one of the most celebrated British mathematicians of the second half of the 20th century. Having made substantial contributions to widely different areas of mathematics, Conway was elected to Honorary Membership of the Society in 2015, the 150th Anniversary Year of the LMS.
Conway was a remarkably talented and original mathematician whose work was invariably elegant and insightful. He spent his student days and much of his working life in Cambridge where he was a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and where he was a fixture in the common room of the old mathematics department on Mill Lane discussing mathematical problems and playing mathematical games. In 1986 he moved to Princeton for personal reasons, expecting to return to Cambridge within five years, but in fact he never came back.
Conway feared that he would be best known for his invention of The Game of Life which is played on a Go board and which had a cult following in the 1970s, occupying millions of hours of computer time. However, the discovery of which he was most proud was the Surreal Numbers, which combined the approaches of Dedekind and Cantor to produce a new rich system of finite, infinite and infinitesimal numbers with many remarkable properties.
Although he had done previous work on number theory and transfinite numbers it was Conway’s discovery in 1968 that the group of symmetries of the Leech lattice was a new simple group, and that it contained two further new simple groups as subgroups, that established him on the world stage. This motivated him to produce a reference group devoted to the finite simple groups and some years later the five-authored Atlas of Finite Groups appeared. It has since become a standard reference book for any mathematician whose work involves symmetries of finite configurations.
Conway’s other great passion was mathematical games and in 1982 he produced, together with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, the wonderful Winning Ways for your mathematical plays. It is indeed ironic that the three authors of this very special book have all died within a few months of one another.
Conway received many honours during his distinguished career. This included the LMS Berwick Prize in 1971 and he was the first recipient of the LMS Pólya Prize in 1987. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1981.
A more complete obituary of John Conway will appear in the July edition of the LMS Newsletter.