The hardest thing for me is seeing his amazing body of work so badly reduced to this one old plaything from his early days. Just his contributions to knot theory or the classification of finite groups would have been enough to make him famous as a mathematician. Don Knuth wrote a romantic dialogue on Conway’s system of “surreal numbers”.
This was a hard way to get this news.
The hardest thing for me is seeing his amazing body of work so badly reduced to this one old plaything from his early days. Just his contributions to knot theory or the classification of finite groups would have been enough to make him famous as a mathematician. Don Knuth wrote a romantic dialogue on Conway’s system of “surreal numbers”.
If all you know of Conway is GOL, please read up.