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Conway's Winning Ways
John Conway (1937—2020) found a way of creating surreal numbers based on two-player games.
We will examine the game of Hackenbush in which players take turns removing the edges of a graph
according to a specific set of rules.
Conway's theory can be applied to many other games. As with much of Conway's work there is deep mathematics
and much whimsy.
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Welcome to the Math Club home page!
The math club meets once a week in the Winter term, on Thursday evenings for about an hour. It is intended for anyone interested in mathematics, whether they are a math major or not.
At each meeting a speaker will discuss an interesting idea in mathematics. We try to pick topics that can be understood without much background. An ideal topic is one which starts with something simple, and by exploring its twists and turns, leads to something unexpectedly deeper.
The goal is to show mathematics the way that mathematicians see it: a living subject full of deep and intertwining ideas, growing naturally out of our desire to understand the fundamental concepts of space and number.
| Date | Topic | Speaker | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan. | 23 | The $2$-adic logarithm | M. Ram Murty | ||
| 30 | Domino Tilings | Gregory G. Smith | |||
| Feb. | 6 | Pseudorandom number generation and the NSA backdoor | Mike Roth | ||
| 13 | Conway's Winning Ways | Jamie Mingo | |||
| 27 | TBA | TBA | |||
| Mar. | 6 | TBA | Thomas Barthelmé | ||
| 13 | TBA | TBA | |||
| 20 | Compressed Sensing | Yanglei Song | |||
| 27 | TBA | TBA | |||
| Apr. | 3 | TBA | TBA |
The meetings are Thursdays in Jeff 118 from 17:30–18:30.
To suggest a topic for the Math Club, or to find out further information, please email Ivan Dimitrov, Mike Roth, or Greg Smith .
| Web Site of the Week |
| Check out Quanta Magazine; an online science magazine specializing in Mathematics, Physics, and the Life Sciences. |
| Winter 2025 |
| Queen's University |
| Kingston, Ontario |