John Horton Conway. 26 December 1937—11 April 2020

John Conway was without doubt one of the most celebrated British mathematicians of the last half century. He first gained international recognition in 1968 when he constructed the automorphism group of the then recently-discovered Leech lattice, and in so doing discovered three new sporadic simple groups. At around the same time he invented The Game of Life, which brought him to the attention of a much wider audience and led to a cult following of Lifers. He also combined the methods of Cantor and Dedekind for extending number systems to construct what Donald Knuth (ForMemRS 2003) called ‘surreal numbers’, the achievement of which Conway was probably most proud. Throughout his life he continued to make significant contributions to many branches of mathematics, including number theory, logic, algebra, combinatorics and geometry, and in his later years he teamed up with Simon Kochen to produce the Free Will theorem, which asserts that if humans have free will then, in a certain sense, so do elementary particles. In this biographical memoir I attempt to give some idea of the depth and breadth of Conway's contribution to mathematics.

ON A DESIGN FROM PRIMITIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE FINITE SIMPLE GROUPS

In this paper we present a design construction from primitive permutation representations of a finite simple group G. The group G acts primitively onthe points and transitively on the blocks of the design. The construction has this property that with some conditions we can obtain t-design for t >=2. We examine our design for fourteen sporadic simple groups. As a result we found a 2-(176,5,4) design with full automorphism group M22.

Generators for maximal subgroups of Conway group Co1

The Conway groups are the three sporadic simple groups Co1, Co2 and Co3. There are total of 22 maximal subgroups of Co1 and generators of 6 maximal subgroups are provided in web Atlas of finite simple groups. The aim of this paper is to give generators of remaining 16 maximal subgroups.