Moderator Note
This said, this point could have been made without the snark. See Machine Elf’s post for a proper example.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
This.
Conway sounds like a cool and important guy, but I don’t recall having heard of him. John Prine is still the only death I’ve heard about of someone I knew of before all this.
He was incredibly prominent among those people who might have heard of some mathematicians. Also, I knew him.
(I hadn’t actually heard of John Prine, but he sounds famous and important.)
Tim Brooke-Taylor was very famous in the UK, and a few people in the US might know of him because he originated the Four Yorkshiremen sketch with John Cleese and others. He was a member of the Goodies, which rivalled Monty Python for popular surreal humour, and widely known as a genuinely lovely person.
The Game of Life is really, really huge for computer scientists and mathematicians, and that was only the most popular thing that Conway developed. To even be known in pop culture as a mathematician in the modern age is incredibly rare; the only others are probably Andrew Wiles and John Nash, and the latter only became really well known after he had a movie made about him. Given that we’re on a internet message board with an intellectual bent, there are going to be plenty more people who know about Conway than compared to the general public.
So while I can see that to the world in general, Prine is probably the most famous, to the denizens of this board, Conway is much more likely to be better known.
Tim Brooke-Taylor I feel would be more famous to me if I was told what he did; I’m familiar with him being on the At last the 1948 show (or whatever it was) where the 4 Yorkshireman premiered with 2 future Pythons, but I didn’t recognize the name without that. All I could tell you about John Prine is that he was a musician; I’m not familiar with any of his work.
If you don’t know John Prine’s music, you may know Angel from Montgomery, which he wrote and Bonnie Raitt sang.
This is the article Rolling Stone published after his death.
Whether or not you like that rootsy style of music, I think most can appreciate Prine’s off-kilter sensibility as expressed in his lyrics. One of my favorite examples is his duet with Iris DeMint, “In Spite of Ourselves”:
Moderator Note: Lyrics removed. Please do not copy and paste the entire lyrics to a song as that goes far beyond fair use.
Still makes me smile. Cheeky and bawdy, yet sweet at the same time.
Yeah, the reverse is the case for me. Although in my case I am fairly familiar with three relatively modern day mathematicians (who were prominent in the past hundred years or so): Godel, von Neumann, and Turing. Funny thing with that is that I know a fair bit about each; I can’t think of any that I’ve just vaguely heard of without being able to say anything specific about them.
Check out the latest XKCD.
Conway became famous when Scientific American wrote about him (Gardner, Mathematical Games, 1970). Before the internet, when we read magazines for fun and edification.
Just saw on Military.com that the actor, Forrest Compton, who played Gomer Pyle’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Edward Gray, died from COVID-19, back on 4 April 2020.
Oh, that is perfect. Esp. love that it produces a glider that moves on forever. Very symbolic.
The cause of death is ambiguous, but given the timing and where he lived, covid seems likely.
I doubt many people know his name, but his photo shop was huge and influential, so I feel like he belongs in this thread.
And he isn’t fudging it–that’s the actual way that configuration plays out.
I figured Randall would do a real one. But that leaves open the question of whether it is original. The glider thing from such a small configuration while maintaining a human shape isn’t trivial.
Moderating
I would request that posters name the person they are talking about, and why they are known, rather than requiring them to click on a link to figure out who you are talking about.
Colibri
Quarantine Zone Moderator
Donno about that–I’ve never seen it before.
Sorry, it’s in the link’s name if you hover over it, no need to click. It’s the founder of Adorama Cameras.
Who?
If wikipedia page views in the days after someone’s death are a measure of their fame, Prine is more famous than Conway (but not by as much as I would have expected)
Just to note that this doesn’t occur for all. (Could be the browser or the forum-style, but to see what a link says I have to paste to a word-processor–hover doesn’t work, here, for me.)