New UK train station got their math inspiration wrong

2017-06-12T17:14:00-04:00

Conway confirmed what several mathematicians have noticed since the station’s unveiling: the pattern on the façade follows the logic not of Conway’s Life but of Wolfram’s Rule 30, a different cellular automaton identified by the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram.

Atkins designed £50m Cambridge North railway station, a 4,843 sq ft building with three platforms and parking, opened this May.
Its aluminum façade was inspired by The Game of Life, a cellular automaton that a British mathematician John Horton Conway developed in 1970. Conway, nevertheless, claims that he does not recognize his work in the architecture of the station.

“That’s not mine,” the mathematician said of the pattern. “I have had an influence on Cambridge, but not apparently on the new railway station.”

As a 2015 Guardian profile of Conway put it, “the Game of Life demonstrates how simplicity generates complexity, providing an analogy for all of mathematics, and the entire universe."

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New UK train station got their math inspiration wrong