John Horton Conway

John Horton Conway FRS
Conway in June 2005
Born	(1937-12-26)26 December 1937 Liverpool, England
Died	11 April 2020(2020-04-11) (aged 82) New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.
Education	Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD)
Known for	ATLAS of Finite Groups Conway chained arrow notation Conway criterion Conway groups Conway notation (knot theory) Conway polyhedron notation Conway's Game of Life Doomsday algorithm Free will theorem Icosians Look-and-say sequence Mathieu groupoid Monstrous moonshine Pinwheel tiling Surreal numbers
Awards	Berwick Prize (1971) Fellow of the Royal Society (1981) Pólya Prize (1987) Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) Leroy P. Steele Prize (2000)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Cambridge Princeton University
Thesis	Homogeneous ordered sets (1964)
Doctoral advisor	Harold Davenport[1]
Doctoral students	Richard Borcherds[1] Adrian Mathias[1] Simon Norton[1] Robert Wilson[1]
Website	Archived version @ web.archive.org

John Horton Conway FRS (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career.^[2] On 11 April 2020, at age 82, he died of complications from COVID-19.^[3]