John Conway Lecture

Cambridge 2000 memos

March 2002

John Conway recently gave two lectures in Cambridge, one on 28 February (on the Game of Life), and a far more interesting one (a Darwin Lecture) on 1 March. These are some notes about what he discussed in that second lecture. He gave three interesting and simple proofs of various bits of mathematics (these are all PDF files since that is currently the best way to typeset maths on the web):

• the square root of 2 is irrational, a geometric proof (45 kb)
• Morley's Theorem, the trisections of the angles of any triangle meet in an equilateral triangle (177 kb)
• there is a non-trivial knot (131 kb)

The last part of his lecture was about "tangles" but he did not prove anything about them.

Cambridge 2000 memos