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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
I had the pleasure of working with Jon over several articles he wrote or co-wrote for The Conversation. I always admired his enthusiasm for explaining all things mathematical to a wide audience – especially a non-mathematician audience. The first article he penned for us was on his favourite number, pi, and he contributed several other articles on pi over the years, especially on Pi Day.
Several of Jon’s articles we published were co-written with his long-time friend David Bailey and co-author of articles originally published on their Math Drudge website. Other articles were original ideas that he would pitch to
Continue reading A man with a passion for explaining mathematics
For the last four years, Jon and I were colleagues. It’s hard for me to put into words a single impression of Jon. He was a force of nature, uncontainable and omnipresent. His passion for knowledge was insatiable and drove him to a breadth of research that is extremely rare in modern times. He was a generous host and doting grandfather—a talk with Jon inevitably started with a slew of stories of what happened with his grandkids over the weekend. He was a strategic leader, going into centres and societies and universities and academies with intention and agency. I saw
Continue reading Jon Borwein: a force of nature
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
Continue reading Condolences
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