Conway visited Arkansas in April of 2016. Due to some sort of communication breakdown--there were many that year--I did not even know the talk was scheduled to happen. Shortly after the fact, I was finally informed. It was not at all funny to me, being left out, and even less so today. If you understand science and the way the classification and rating systems work, it could all make perfect sense, with some people in the Math department, and others in the physics department, each minding their own business (but I refuse to accept that explanation as valid at all). During this same time I was studying odd plane tilings, and enjoyed learning about his "Tiling Groups", see: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2324578 (and the original reference therein) The mathoverflow thread is nice, but left this one out. Cheers, --Brad On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 9:20 AM Adam P. Goucher <apgoucher@gmx.com> wrote:
I only met John Conway once (on 19th November 2015, when he gave a talk at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge on the topic of surreal numbers).
http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/62570
I particularly remember his excellent sense of humour: he apologised for pronouncing 'z' as 'zee' [as a result of being in Princeton for the last few decades] and on the second occasion remarked:
"I define 'zee' to be 'zed'"
so that he could continue using the US and UK pronunciations interchangeably.
--------
This is a great thread, incidentally:
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/357197/conways-lesser-known-results
Best wishes,
Adam P. Goucher
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