English mathematician (1937–2020)
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician, and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey. He was active in the theory of s, , number theory, and . He also made contributions to many branches of , most notably the invention of the with . Born and raised in , 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. He died of complications from COVID-19 at age 82.
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[T]his Kochen-Specker paradox ...what it does ...[T]here's a problem in physics ...the measurement problem ...that's a wrong description. There's ...measuring the squared spin of a spin one particle. ...Let's say "measuring the spin" or measuring the [squared] component of spin ...of a spin one particle in a certain direction.
It's one of the things I most admire about Simon Kochen, my co-author, that... in August 2006, we'd been talking about this... for years... Suddenly the scales fell away, that had been obscuring the thing, and I said... "We've proved if we have free will, so do the particles" and he... said "Yes... this means that my stuff with Ax is all nonsense, doesn't it?"
SPIN... is a... curious axiom. If you take one of these particles and ask it what... it's squared component of spin is, in three... mutually perpendicular directions, it always happens that two of the answers are 1, and one of them is 0. That's most mysterious... and... it's not possible to solve this puzzle. ...[W]e have these 33 directions, and it's not possible to assign 0s and 1s to them, subject to that condition... the 1-0-1 rule. ...[T]he particle is acting somewhat like a little boy ...making up its mind as it goes along. It doesn't stop it from giving answers, but it does stop the answers from being determined ahead of time, and that's the guts of it.
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The general... problem... packing... in n-dimensional space. ...[T]here is nothing mysterious about n-dimensional space. A point in real n-dimensional space <math>\R^n</math> is... a string of real numbers<math>x = (x_1,x_2,x_3, ...,x_n)</math>.A sphere in <math>\R^n</math> with center <math>u = (u_1,u_2,u_3, ...,u_n)</math> and radius <math>\rho</math> consists of all points <math>x</math>... satisfying <math>(x_1-u_1)^2 + (x_2-u_2)^2+ ... +(x_n-u_n)^2 = \rho^2</math>. We can describe a sphere packing in <math>\R^n</math>... by specifying the centers <math>u</math> and the radius.