David H. Bailey – författare

The research of Jonathan Borwein has had a profound impact on optimization, functional analysis, operations research, mathematical programming, number theory, and experimental mathematics. Having authored more than a dozen books and more than 300 publications, Jonathan Borwein is one of the most productive Canadian mathematicians ever. His research spans pure, applied, and computational mathematics as well as high performance computing, and continues to have an enormous impact: MathSciNet lists more than 2500 citations by more than 1250 authors, and Borwein is one of the 250 most cited mathematicians of the period 1980-1999. He has served the Canadian Mathematics Community through his presidency (2000–02) as well as his 15 years of editing the CMS book series.

Jonathan Borwein’s vision and initiative have been crucial in initiating and developing several institutions that provide support for researchers with a wide range of scientific interests. A few notable examples include the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics and the IRMACS Centre at Simon Fraser University, the Dalhousie Distributed Research Institute at Dalhousie University, the Western Canada Research Grid, and the Centre for Computer Assisted Research Mathematics and its Applications, University of Newcastle.

The workshops that were held over the years in Dr. Borwein’s honor attracted high-caliber scientists from a wide range of mathematical fields. This present volume is an outgrowth of the workshop on ‘Computational and Analytical Mathematics’ held in May 2011 in celebration of Dr. Borwein’s 60th Birthday. The collection contains various state-of-the-art research manuscripts and surveys presenting contributions that have risen from the conference, and is an excellent opportunity to survey state-of-the-art research and discuss promising research directions and approaches.

This book contains a compendium of 25 papers published since the 1970s dealing with pi and associated topics of mathematics and computer science.  The collection begins with a Foreword by Bruce Berndt. Each contribution is preceded by a brief summary of its content as well as a short key word list indicating how the content relates to others in the collection. The volume includes articles on actual computations of pi, articles on mathematical questions related to pi (e.g., “Is pi normal?”), articles presenting new and often amazing techniques for computing digits of pi (e.g., the “BBP” algorithm for pi, which permits one to compute an arbitrary binary digit of pi without needing to compute any of the digits that came before), papers presenting important fundamental mathematical results relating to pi, and papers presenting new, high-tech techniques for analyzing pi (i.e., new graphical techniques that permit one to visually see if pi and other numbers are “normal”).  

This volume is a companion to Pi: A Source Book whose third edition released in 2004.  The present collection begins with 2 papers from 1976, published by Eugene Salamin and Richard Brent, which describe “quadratically convergent” algorithms for pi and other basic mathematical functions, derived from some mathematical work of Gauss. Bailey and Borwein hold that these two papers constitute the beginning of the modern era of computational mathematics.  This time period (1970s) also corresponds with the introduction of high-performance computer systems (supercomputers), which since that time have increased relentlessly in power, by approximately a factor of 100,000,000, advancing roughly at the same rate as Moore’s Law of semiconductor technology.  This book may be of interest to a wide range of mathematical readers; some articles cover more advanced research questions suitable for active researchers in the field, but several are highly accessible to undergraduate mathematics students.