Jonathan Borwein

Jonathan Michael Borwein (20 May 1951 – 2 August 2016)[1][2] was a Scottish mathematician who held an appointment as Laureate Professor of mathematics at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He was a close associate of David H. Bailey, and they have been prominent public advocates of experimental mathematics.

Jonathan Michael Borwein
Born(1951-05-20)20 May 1951
St. Andrews, Scotland
Died2 August 2016(2016-08-02) (aged 65)
Known forExperimental mathematics, expert on pi, optimization, number theory, functional analysis
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics

Contributions

Borwein's interests spanned pure mathematics (analysis), applied mathematics (optimization), computational mathematics (numerical and computational analysis), and high performance computing. He authored ten books (most recently several on Experimental Mathematics and a monograph on convex functions, and over 400 refereed articles. He was a co-founder (1995) of a software company MathResources, consulting and producing interactive software primarily for school and university mathematics. For almost ten years before his death, Borwein was completely unaffiliated with MathResources.

Borwein was also an expert on the number pi and especially its computation.

Education and career

Borwein was born in St. Andrews, Scotland in 1951 into a Jewish family. He received his B.A. (Honours Math) from University of Western Ontario in 1971, and his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1974 as a Rhodes Scholar at Jesus College.

Prior to joining Simon Fraser University in 1993, he worked at Dalhousie University (1974–91), Carnegie-Mellon (1980–82) and the University of Waterloo (1991–93). He was Shrum Professor of Science (1993–2003) and a Canada Research Chair in Information Technology (2001–08) at Simon Fraser University, where he was founding Director of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics and developed the Inverse Symbolic Calculator together with his brother and Simon Plouffe. In 2004, he (re-)joined the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University as a Canada Research Chair in Distributed and Collaborative Research, cross-appointed in Mathematics, while preserving an adjunct appointment at Simon Fraser.

Service

Borwein was Governor at large of the Mathematical Association of America (2004–07), was president of the Canadian Mathematical Society (2000–02) and chair of (the Canadian National Science Library) NRC-CISTI Advisory Board (2000–2003). He served as chair of various of NATO's scientific programs. He was also Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI). He chaired the Canadian HPC consortium, now Compute Canada and the International Mathematical Union's Committee on Electronic Information and Communications (2002–2008).

Recognition

He has received various awards including the Chauvenet Prize (1993), Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (1994), Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002), an honorary degree from Limoges (1999), and foreign membership in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2003). He was elected as a Fellow to the Australian Academy of Science (2010). In 2014, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[3] He was an ISI highly cited mathematician for the period 1981–1999.

gollark: Just zoom and enhance, silly.
gollark: Why not?
gollark: I actually bought a box of 50 pens so I can just arbitrarily lose/waste pens constantly. It's very efficient.
gollark: I just always use pens, since I accidentally ran out of pencils at some point.
gollark: I tried writing left-handed ironically but it remains really slow and annoying.

See also

Notes
  1. "CV". Archived from the original on 2014-12-18. Retrieved 2011-04-25.
  2. Math Drudge obituary
  3. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
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