Related papers: Conway's Wizards
About Conway's surreal numbers: A letter to a friend (written in French). In memoriam John Horton Conway.
The napkin problem was first posed by John H. Conway, and written up as a `toughie' in "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection," by Peter Winkler. To paraphrase Winkler's book, there is a banquet dinner to be served at a…
We discuss some old common knowledge puzzles and introduce a lot of new common knowledge puzzles.
This is an introduction into John Conway's beautiful Combinatorial Game Theory, providing precise statements and detailed proofs for the fundamental parts of his theory. (1) Combinatorial game theory, (2) the GROUP of games, (3) the FIELD…
Consider a variant of the usual story about the iterative conception of sets. As usual, at every stage, you find all the (bland) sets of objects which you found earlier. But you also find the result of tapping any earlier-found object with…
J. Conway defined useful operations on the Class of combinatorial games and also introduced a notion of equivalence between games. Conway showed that, under his equivalence, games form a Group. However, Conway product is not well defined on…
We establish fun parallels between coin-weighing puzzles and knights-and-knaves puzzles.
The Collatz conjecture is a famous math problem that was introduced by Lothar Collatz in 1937, and nobody has yet succeeded in proving or disproving it. In this article, I will analyze this problem with a new approach and I will discuss my…
Conway's surreal numbers were aptly named by Knuth. This note examines how far one can get towards implementing surreals and the arithmetic operations on them so that they execute efficiently. Lazy evaluation and recursive data structures…
John Horton Conway's Cosmological Theorem, about Audioactive sequences, for which no extant proof existed, is given a computer-generated proof, hopefully for good.
See hep-th/9903228.
We study the famous mathematical puzzle of prisoners and hats. We introduce a framework in which various variants of the problem can be formalized. We examine three particular versions of the problem (each one in fact a class of problems)…
A `transplantable pair' is a pair of glueing diagrams that can be used to create pairs of plane domains that are isospectral for the Laplace operator. We present a host of transplantable pairs worked out by John Conway using his theory of…
The famous theorem of Conway and Coxeter on frieze patterns gave a geometric interpretation to integral friezes via triangulations of polygons. In this article, we review this result and show some of the development it has led to. The last…
In a very celebrated paper A. Connes has formulated a conjecture which is now one of the most important open problem in Operator Algebras. This importance comes from the works of many mathematicians who have found some unexpected equivalent…
The paper presents a general introduction to the astonishing method for deriving probability approximations that was invented by Charles Stein around 50 years ago.
This article covers my second talk at the Gathering for Gardner in March, 2010. It is about an Odd One Out puzzle I invented, after having been inspired by Martin Gardner. I do not like Odd One Out questions; that is why I invented one.
Using coalgebraic methods, we extend Conway's theory of games to possibly non-terminating, i.e. non-wellfounded games (hypergames). We take the view that a play which goes on forever is a draw, and hence rather than focussing on winning…
W. M. Hirsch formulated a beautiful conjecture on diameters of convex polyhedra.I suggest a new viewpoint with the deformation and moduli of polytopes.
Conway and Doyle have claimed to be able to divide by three. We attempt to replicate their achievement and fail. In the process, we get tangled up in some shoes and socks and forget how to multiply.