Paul Tooke.

[dtooke2003]

Hi, I am not sure of the appropriate place for this post. But I have seen some references to my brother Paul Tooke on this site. I know he was a part of the Conway's Game of Life community.
I just wanted to inform you that, unfortunately, Paul passed away 15 May 2024 in Cambridge.

He led a relatively solitary life and I know this community had been important to him.

Regards,
David Tooke.

[Sokwe]

Thank you for this information, as sad as it is. I regard Paul Tooke as one of the most important contributors to elementary spaceship searching (my personal favorite Life subtopic), and I have used his code, discoveries, and pattern collections to improve my own work. He will be deeply missed. My condolences to you and anyone else close to Paul.

Edit:

I am not sure of the appropriate place for this post.

I moved this thread to the General Discussion forum.

[C28]

Hi, I am not sure of the appropriate place for this post. But I have seen some references to my brother Paul Tooke on this site. I know he was a part of the Conway's Game of Life community.
I just wanted to inform you that, unfortunately, Paul passed away 15 May 2024 in Cambridge.

He led a relatively solitary life and I know this community had been important to him.

Regards,
David Tooke.

give my regards to his family. it is always sad to lose a member of this community.

[Katrina]

I am really saddened by this, and I am almost speechless at this point. May he rest in peace.

[Antonin Duda]

My sincere condolences to you and everyone related to paul tooke...

[M. I. Wright]

I want to add to Sokwe's post that Paul Tooke's work on utilities we use, gencols and gfind, had a dramatic impact on the direction of this community that I actually didn't understand until today. His work was prescient in that it seems to have gone unappreciated by people other than Eric Goldstein for three to five years, but by chance Eric was around to notice that a new class of cellular automaton we were exploring in 2015 had actually been described before and could already be explored with Paul's versions of gfind and gencols. This post of EricG's introduced many of us to this body of work and to a notation scheme devised by Alan Hensel that Paul was one of only three people to have ever written software for, which gave us an accessible-enough way to discuss these cellular automata that it kicked off a sort of craze that has never died down. I noticed that Paul Tooke lamented at the end of this post that he wasn't getting much engagement at all with his labor and thoughts, and I find it heartening to see in hindsight that even if almost nobody was there to receive them in the moment they ended up setting the stage for what people in this community have been enjoying for the last ten years and counting. My regards to you, your family, and everyone who knew him. We're fortunate to have had him around these parts and we'll continue to benefit from his contributions for a long time.

[otismo]

CA pioneer - R. I. P.