Condolences

It was sad to hear of the untimely passing of Jon Borwein, and my deepest condolences go out to his family. I did not know Jon well, but I have always been impressed with his depth, breadth, and energy. His work with David Bailey in promoting and popularizing an experimental view of mathematics has been deeply influential. Mathematicians like to hold themselves aloof from the experimental sciences, maintaining that our fortress guards a certain purity. Finally here was the unabashed view that numerical experiments play an absolutely essential role.

Twice I have attended conferences that Jon had a hand in organizing, one in Halifax and one (in memory of Alf van der Poorten) in Newcastle. As one might expect from projects involving Jon, the conferences were exciting, welcoming, and memorable.

My sole joint paper with Jon (also joint with Bailey and the late Richard Crandall) dealt with the density of 1’s in the binary expansions of algebraic numbers. In mathscinet I see that Jon had 163 collaborators over his career, a truly astounding number. I count myself most fortunate to be among them. [Carl Pomerance, Dartmouth College, USA]

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