John Horton Conway 1937 - 2020 15 April 2020

John Horton Conway was born on 26 December 1937 in Liverpool.  

He was the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce. He became interested in mathematics at a very early age; his mother has recalled that he could recite the powers of two when he was four years old. By the age of eleven his ambition was to become a mathematician.

After leaving secondary school, Conway entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to study mathematics.

He was awarded his BA in 1959 and began to undertake research in number theory supervised by Harold Davenport.  After leaving Cambridge in 1986, he took up the appointment of the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University.

Conway is especially known for the invention of the Game of Life, one of the early examples of a cellular automaton. His initial experiments in that field were done with pen and paper, long before personal computers existed.

In recent years he, in conjunction with Alex Ryba, has published three Gazette items:

November 2013: A Note entitled Fibonometry 
July 2014: An Article entitled The Steiner-Lehmus angle-bisector theorem
March 2016: An Article entitled Remembering spherical trigonometry

He developed symptoms of coronavirus on Wednesday and passed away on Saturday. Until his death he lived in the USA but retained British nationality.

In 2017, he was invited to be an Honorary Member of the MA and was delighted to accept because he did not have to do anything!

(Photo by Denise Applewhite, Princeton University)