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[Superdorf]

https://xkcd.com/2293/

 

[Dunamisdeos]

https://xkcd.com/2293/

 

Aw John Conway nooo

[Eschar]

https://xkcd.com/2293/

 

Aw John Conway nooo

:-(

[bloop_bleep]

What's making me a bit upset is that John Conway actually said that his Game of Life is not what he wanted to be remembered for. He made a lot of important contributions to group theory and he just saw this whole Game of Life thing as an amusement for his math column, which happened to blow up.

[Naturegirl1999]

I didn’t know he did group theory, what were some of the contributions he made?

[Dunamisdeos]

I'm not........ INTO math, shall we say? But I know he was an accomplished mathematician.

[Naturegirl1999]

When I thought group theory, it made me think like, how do people interact in groups/how groups of people interact with other groups of people

[methylatedspirit]

That's just called sociology/economics, isn't it? Group theory is more abstract than that. I can't really do justice to how complex and far-reaching group theory is in math, since I barely understand it myself, unfortunately.

Can someone more familiar with group theory explain what it is?

[WealthyRadish]

A group is about linking some set of things with an operator that satisfies a few properties. Two elements together need to result in another element in the group; there needs to be an identity element that does nothing to the other elements; each element needs to have a unique inverse that results in that identity element; and the operation needs to be associative.

An example would be Z₅^* = { 1, 2, 3, 4 } under multiplication modulo 5. The inverse in this group of 3 for example is 2 (2 * 3 = 6 -> 1 mod 5). But if you looked at Z₄^* = { 1, 2, 3 } under multiplication, you'd find it isn't a group. With 2, for example, there's no inverse (2*1 = 2, 2*2 = 0, 2*3 = 2, and 2*2 = 0 isn't in the set).

It's not just numbers; there's all sorts of interesting groups describing things like rotations and transformations of geometric objects, certain matrices, and roots of unity, or zillions of other things.

[Iduno]

What's making me a bit upset is that John Conway actually said that his Game of Life is not what he wanted to be remembered for. He made a lot of important contributions to group theory and he just saw this whole Game of Life thing as an amusement for his math column, which happened to blow up.

I'm still trying to figure out if I was supposed to care about the boops or the beeps in the game.

[Reelya]

What's making me a bit upset is that John Conway actually said that his Game of Life is not what he wanted to be remembered for. He made a lot of important contributions to group theory and he just saw this whole Game of Life thing as an amusement for his math column, which happened to blow up.

I'm still trying to figure out if I was supposed to care about the boops or the beeps in the game.

You're meant to focus on getting a high score.

EDIT: that reminds of an anti-video-game thing. A while back one of the reviewers for the Silent Hill movie said that the only thing good about the movie was the soundtrack, which replaced the "beeps and boops" of the video game. In fact, the music was directly lifted out of one of the games. That's what happens when you get an older movie reviewer reviewing something based on a modern game and they haven't seen a video game since Pac Man.

[scriver]

TFW "a while back" is twenty years ago

[Reelya]

That's when the games came out, not the movie. That was 2006. Closer to a decade ago, not 20 years.

[bloop_bleep]

A group is about linking some set of things with an operator that satisfies a few properties. Two elements together need to result in another element in the group; there needs to be an identity element that does nothing to the other elements; each element needs to have a unique inverse that results in that identity element; and the operation needs to be associative.

An example would be Z₅^* = { 1, 2, 3, 4 } under multiplication modulo 5. The inverse in this group of 3 for example is 2 (2 * 3 = 6 -> 1 mod 5). But if you looked at Z₄^* = { 1, 2, 3 } under multiplication, you'd find it isn't a group. With 2, for example, there's no inverse (2*1 = 2, 2*2 = 0, 2*3 = 2, and 2*2 = 0 isn't in the set).

It's not just numbers; there's all sorts of interesting groups describing things like rotations and transformations of geometric objects, certain matrices, and roots of unity, or zillions of other things.

Yeah. There are also other forms of algebraic structures in abstract algebra, such as rings (two operations, + and *, with + commutativity; +,* associativity; * over + distributivity; and +,* identity) and fields (rings with * inverses), among many others.

[Folly]

I am mildly upset by the fact that "So..." seems to have become a commonly acceptable way to start a sentence.