John Conway: Surreal Numbers - How playing games led to more numbers than anybody ever thought of

See The Game of Nim for some necessary backround, without which this brilliant lecture will be utterly incomprehensible!

Apparently this was recorded on February 23,  2016.

At 45:13 "Numbers are games" See On Numbers and Games ByJohn H. Conway, also Game theory, Strategy (in game_theory) and Randomness.

At 51:20 on inductive definition, see Epsilon induction and this book:

Subscribe to The Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto public outreach: It's All About Math.

Relaxed discussion about maths anecdotes somewhere:

26:35 Anectdotes about von Neumann and Edward Teller.At 31:00 the origins of Conway's game of Life (von Neumann's idea about colonising other planets with self-replicating machines). His idea of Universal computing is really interesting: 39:20 basically, he sees it in almost any system with complex enough behaviour and reinterpret its operation as computation. 46:00 He didn't see the Game of Life as mathematical.as such. Just computational.

2014 Numberphile Interview

See this Guardian article John Horton Conway obituary from 23rd April 2020.

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