John Horton Conway
Department of Mathematics, Fine Hall, Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
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Died: April 11, 2020
First email (in along time): Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 4:45 PM
Dear Prof. Dr. John Conway:
You may not want me to reference your work because this article I am struggling to write just might be the penultimate foolishness. Your quick comments will be appreciated.
Back about ten years ago, you allowed an acquaintance and me to spend a day essentially following you around on campus. We chatted often and had a late lunch. My name is Bruce Camber and I had flown in from California. My work at the time was producing a television series, Small Business School, that aired on PBS stations around the USA and on the Voice of America around the world.
Long before — in 1972 — I had been a member of the Philomorphs with Arthur Loeb and Synergetics I & II were part of my early education. You may remember that I was particularly hung up on the interior nesting of simple platonic geometries, particularly the octahedron (David Bohm got me going in that direction).
Two years ago, my nephew asked if I would substitute for him within his five high school geometry classes, “Introduce the platonic solids!” I had been studying a little about Planck’s length and had the kids guess, “How many base-2 notations within would we have to go before we hit that Planck limit?” We discovered just 112. We then went out to the Observable Universe* in another 90+ steps, assuming a wide variegation of nested geometries all the way.
I thought it was a neat ordering system, but when we couldn’t find it anywhere on the web, we put it up on the web. And now, we are puzzling over the first 67 notations (steps, doublings, layers, etc).
Here is the beginning of a speculative, entirely idiosyncratic article about that very simple work: http://81018.com
I would be delighted to hear from you.
Warmly,
Bruce
Bruce Camber
* PS. In an email, I suggested to Luminet that the universe is probably more like
the Pentakis Dodecahedron than a simple dodecahedron….
• What are the most basic questions? Where have we gone wrong?
• Does a simple base-2 exponentiation capture an essence?
