At the recommendation of Brailley Sims of the University of Newcastle, we invited Jonathan Borwein to visit Thailand in April and May, 2013. Jon, Brailley, and Judith seemed to enjoy the trip very much, as they visited many interesting cities and sites in the area. Jon is so strong that he outran our group on a mountain hike.
To me, Jon is one of the giants of mathematics. But the way he treated me was unbelievable. He gave advice and encouragement during conversations. And the most exciting work he mentioned was his ongoing work in experimental mathematics. I like
Continue reading Jonathan Borwein: A giant to me
I first met Jon and Judy at their house in Halifax, where Judy fed me a delicious split-pea soup, Jon talked math, dispensed advice on topics ranging from apartment hunting to paper publishing, and we discovered a shared interest in discussing politics and current events. I was to begin an AARMS postdoc in the math department at Dalhousie with Jon as one of my three co-supervisors later that summer, and was in town looking for a place to live for the coming year and completing paperwork. This day remains in my memory not just because it typified Jon’s warmth and
Continue reading What I learned from Jon
I met Jon when he had just arrived in Newcastle, Australia. Jon very quickly became and energetic and influential person in the Australian mathematical community, not in the least due to his personal and fair approach. I teach “Experimental Mathematics” as a Masters course at The University of Melbourne using his books, and was fortunate to have Jon as a guest lecturer on one occasion. I’ll remember Jon as a passionate mathematician as well as a builder, both of mathematics and human relations. I will always remember and acknowledge the support he gave to many of us, often in the
Continue reading Jon’s influence in Australian mathematics
David Bailey introduced me to Jon in the Summer of 2013. By then David and I had published together 5 papers in computational finance and math finance. Those papers dealt mostly with convex optimization and performance metrics. They were well received and much read, however one could consider them rather mainstream.
For our next project, I suggested to David that we worked on a rather polemic question: Are most finance’s theories false discoveries? Our thesis was that the statistical framework used to test hypothesis in economics and finance promotes false positives. A similar argument in the medical science had led
Continue reading Jon left this world a better place
I have many memories of Jon that make me smile. Some about his quirkiness, all about his joy and seemingly boundless energy. What I’d like to share now is my remembrance of his joy and focus on what inspires. When I first arrived in Burnaby for a year-and-a-half postdoc at SFU, I stayed in Jon’s garden house while I got oriented. I was always welcome in his house. I remember sitting in his dining room with Richard Crandall one evening. This would have been in 2003 when we were working on continued fractions of Ramanujan and utilizing a parallelization feature
Continue reading Jon’s joy
I met Jon and Peter Borwein in 1995 when I was fortunate to become, as Tom Brown’s Ph.D. student, a member of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics (CECM). Jon and Peter established the CECM in 1993 at Simon Fraser University (SFU). What an exciting time that was! There was a constant stream of visitors, in addition to Peter and Jon’s graduate students and post-docs, the CECM staff, and many members of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, which made the CECM a vibrant place where the prevailing feeling was excitement about exploration and creating new methods, approaches, and
Continue reading Jon Borwein: A friend and a mentor
I first met Jonathan Borwein at the International Conference on Analytic Number Theory held in honor of Heini Halberstam at Allerton Park, Illinois in May 1995, about the same time I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with my Ph.D.
However, we had been communicating by email about some formulas of Ramanujan for about a year prior to that first meeting, and I had been keenly aware of his mathematical interests relating to computational complexity since the late 1980s while still an undergraduate student at Waterloo.
Later in the summer of 1995, I learned that my NSERC post-doctoral
Continue reading Recollections of Jon at the CECM
I am proudly one of Jon’s 42 postdoctoral students, and I can attest that he was a wonderful mentor. Probably, his best quality as an advisor was his ability to discover and develop the potential of each of his students, while doing whatever was at his hand to promote our professional careers. Unquestionably, Jon left his trademark in all of us. It was impossible to work with him without learning, as his vast knowledge would inexorably force you to expand yours. He was such an excellent communicator that we all ended up trying to mimic him. Even during his more
Continue reading Farewell to a great mentor
Last week was a sad week. A great man passed away. But … looking at the web, at Mathscinet, at Google Scholar, … Jonathan Borwein will always exist in the mathematics community.
I really did not know Jon well. In fact, my contact with him was mainly via his good friend and colleague David Bailey. We work in different fields, but with a great common point: Experimental Mathematics, where Jon was (and he is, and he will be) one of the most remarkable and influential members. This permitted us to develop a joint paper (also with Bailey) pointing out to
Continue reading Last week was a sad week
I first met Jon Borwein at an Optimization Day workshop at Ballarat University, Australia, in 1999. I was immediately impressed by the power and clarity of Jon’s expertise in convex analysis and optimization. His presentations were always entertaining and insightful. His books are little treasures. The breadth of his knowledge was enormous—not only in relation to the subject matter itself but also to the history and wider relevance of the topic. Jon’s sense of humour was acute. I’m not sure which talk it was—possibly an invited lecture at the annual conference of the Australian Mathematical Society (Aust MS)—but I remember
Continue reading My memories of Jon Borwein
|
|