Jon was a truly special person

Apart from his accomplishments, Jon was a truly special person with respect to his habits of mind, his enthusiasm for life, his sense of humor, his overall graciousness and his perspectives on mathematics and on life. It was a privilege for me to have known him over the years. After his sudden death, I suddenly conceived of and wrote a paper that I have dedicated to him. None of this existed in my mind before his passing, and I deeply believe in the (Christian) idea of annunciation as a spur to creative action. [Gerald Beer, California State University, Los Angeles,

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An absolutely brilliant mathematician

We are shocked and saddened by this unbelievable news.

Jon was an absolutely brilliant mathematician and visionary with incredible gifts also for exposition, for sharing mathematics, and for inventing new ways of doing mathematics. Jon was also a fantastic person who was friendly, encouraging and loving; and he was full of fun and vigour.

We lovingly remember our supper together on July 7th at Massey’s Indian restaurant, and Jon’s great colloquium talk delivered on the same day. Here attached is a poster we made in Jon’s honour for his talk at Western.

We are sending our deepest

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Jon was a creator

Jon was a creator, a great mind, a creative mind, and a light for many, many mathematicians, from many countries. He was a gem, and I still can’t believe he is gone. Everywhere Jon went, he created new opportunities for other mathematicians, by initiating so many fascinating and fruitful research directions, and also by initiating so much infrastructure for collaborations among mathematicians from geographically diverse locations around the world. One of his most recent feats, for example, was the creation of CARMA, which is the research center in Newcastle University, Australia, for ‘Computer Assisted Research Mathematics and its Applications’. This

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My memory of Jon Borwein

Yesterday, Qiji emailed me with the sad and shocking news. After talking to Qiji for a few minutes, I just sat by my desk, stared at the computer monitors, without being able to do anything remotely meaningful for the entire afternoon.

Similar to many others who posted here, Jon played a significant role in my life. What I want to share is some of my memory of Jon (in his 30s).

Jon liked to swim. He often said that swimming gave him the clearest mind. He always did mathematics while he was swimming. Dalhousie has an Olympic sized pool

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Jon: Mentor, Friend, Colleague (by Henry Wolkowicz)

I met Jon Borwein in July of 1978. This was very early in Jon’s career. Jon was an amazing person of course as a mathematician but he also cared a lot for people and helped people. And of course he cared deeply for his family.

I hope some of these remembrances will be of interest to others.

I had just handed in my PhD thesis but had not defended yet when I joined Jon at Dalhousie University in 1978. I think that I was Jon’s first postdoc and Gail (my wife) started a PhD with Jon and so was essentially

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Jon Borwein: My gentle-giant mentor

I will always cherish the wildly fascinating years I spent with Jon Borwein, my mentor and graduate co-supervisor, at the CECM.

Jon took me under his wings and offered me a chance to dabble in the world of mathematical publishing during our bus ride to the math department on a hot summer day in 1995. My initiation to the CJM and CMB for the CMS foreshadowed a series of publishing endeavours including a book cover and my eventual MPub report typeset in LaTeX.

Thanks to Jon’s holistic vision for nurturing mathematical and computing sciences, CECM was a cradle

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To know is great, but to love — even greater

I was shocked to find this notice of Jon Borwein’s passing. Jon’s brilliance in pure and applied math was matched by an unusual–some would say incomparable–ability to share it with others. When I saw Jon in November 2015 at the CARMA Workshop in Newcastle I found a vigorous mind and body who–despite all his hard work and hours logged–then offered to take me on a long hike, to show me more of the “beauty of New South Wales”. (Alas, I wasn’t able to take him up on the offer.) Recently I was named Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle.

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Working with Jon at the Centre for Experimental and Computational Mathematics

Hearing the words of Jon’s family and colleagues at the podium of Logan Funeral Home, the sad fact that Jon had left us set in. Perhaps it is my unconscientious effort to escape the gloomy reality that the memories of the early days when I begin my postdoc work at CECM under the guidance of Jon emerges. It all starts in fall 1993 and what I learned from Jon in CECM, which afterwards still benefits me.

“I think in blocks” was Jon’s answer to my question on how did he work simultaneously with more than a dozen mentees of

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How Jon Borwein became my supervisor

In 1987, I was a student in China. I read a paper by Rockafellar, “Proximal subgradients, marginal values, and augmented Lagrangians in nonconvex optimization” in Mathematical Operation Research (1981). My dream was to generalize results in the paper to infinite dimensional spaces. A literature search found two beautifully written papers by J. Borwein and H. Strojwas, “Proximal analysis and boundaries of closed sets in Banach space I, II,” in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics (1986). The papers were unlike any I had ever seen; their broad applicability and the sheer generality of their results made mathematics seem like child’s play

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My friend Jon Borwein

I met Jon in 1989, soon after my arrival to America. We knew each other by our publications while had never even seen each other’s photos. Jon liked to mention from time to time on various occasions a funny thing from our first meeting. When he asked me how old I am, I replied as people do in Russia with the last two digits of the year I was born. But Jon responded in the Western way with his calendar age at that moment. As a result, it appeared to me that Jon was 10 years older than I, and

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