John Horton Conway

We need to understand the space of all possible intelligences, the space of all possible life forms that can be...

Conway's Game of Life is a super famous simulation by John Conway, where you have this grid of cells, this 2D grid of cells, and they can either be on or off, alive or dead, that's it.

And from this super, super simple world, it's like possibly the simplest possible thing you can think of, you run this, you get insane amounts of complexity that no one would have thought it could do until you actually run it.

You can do counterfactual analysis in other universes, In what worlds do we get this open-ended creation of complexity and emergence? And in what worlds do we not get that? Why does this physics, when you run it, it produces this amazing phenomenon.

So I can start off with the linear one.

I'll start with the simplest one, Conway's Game of Life.

So Conway's Game of Life is a super famous simulation by John Conway where you have this grid of cells, this 2D grid of cells, and they can either be on or off, alive or dead.

That's it.

But there is another kind of mathematics and another kind of mathematician.

This style is embodied by mathematicians like Leonard Euler, Srinivasa Ramanujan and John Horton Conway, Rene Tom and the sparkling imaginativeness of their work.

René Thom, a Fields medalist, is especially interesting.

Ivar Ekelend, in his obituary essay on Thom, wrote, When I first met René Thom in 1970, he was already a legend in mathematics.