Life, Death and the Monster (John Conway) - Numberphile
Why Hacker News recommends it
After Conway's death in 2020, HN commenters pointed to it as a moving interview about his life and mortality, and as a source for his remark that nobody knows why the Monster group exists.
Recommended by 4 people across 2 different months, 2015 to 2026.
What it is
A short Numberphile interview by Brady Haran with mathematician John H. Conway, who names the mystery he would most like to solve: why the Monster group exists. He also reflects on his own career, prominence and mortality.
Cited in 1 Wikipedia article, including Monster group.
What people said
Recommends tdicola · 2015-07 · Hacker News · on “John Conway – The world’s most charismatic mathematician”
Numberphile, an awesome youtube channel on its own, has done some great interviews with John Conway that are definitely worth watching: [LINK] , [LINK] , [this video] He really comes across as a genuinely great guy.
Recommends vijayrudraraju · 2020-04 · Hacker News · on “John Conway has died”
Numberphile has some great interviews with him, very interesting man... Life, Death, and the Monster: [this video] Look-and-say Numbers: [LINK]
Recommends falcrist · 2020-04 · Hacker News · on “Remembering Conway”
Conway gave Brady Haran a very interesting interview a few years ago in which he contemplated his own mortality somewhat. [this video] It really puts some of these mathematical problems into perspective when you think about how they can span multiple human lives.
Recommends areoform · 2020-04 · Hacker News · on “John Conway”
Conway's meditations on life are beautiful, "You know in my early twenties, let's say, people always thought that I would, you know, be a great mathematician. And be good at various things and so on. And in my late twenties, I hadn't achieved any of the things that people were predicting, and so I call it my black period. I started to wonder you know whether it was all nonsense. Whether I was not a good mathematician after all and so on, and then I made a certain discovery and was shot into international prominence. As a mathematician when you become a prominent mathematician, in that sense, it doesn't mean that many people know your name. It means that many mathematicians know your name, an
Cites sndean · 2020-04 · Hacker News · on “John Conway has died”
There were several videos that Numberphile did with Conway, including one where he talked about what problems he'd like to see before he died and his own mortality [0]. In particular he wanted to know why the Monster group [1] exists, what it's about, why it's there [2]. I don't know enough about it to know if progress was made toward that in the past few years since the video was made. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Cites happytoexplain · 2020-04 · Hacker News · on “Inventing Game of Life (2014) [video]”
Not a longer cut, but this is the video about the thing he would "most like to know", if that's what you're referring to. [this video]
Cites Kotlopou · 2026-10 · Hacker News · on “The recently proposed o(n log n) integer multiplication algorithm [pdf]”
I've seen this claim repeated a bunch of times, it spreads as a meme, but the analogy doesn't work that well. This is not a special feature of biology! Chemical engineering involves lots of trial and error, physics is all about neglecting complicated aspects of a situation and hoping the result is still useful, even fundamental physics has a bunch of cancelations that work with no very good justification (see troubles around renormalization) and then fail when you try to do quantum gravity. Even math has things we know are true but have no good conception of why -- see John Conway on the Monster Group ("there's never been any kind of explanation for why it's there"): [this video] The whole world