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Peter Benjamin Borwein (St. Andrews, Scotland, 1953) is a Canadian mathematician and a professor at Simon Fraser University. He is known as a co-discoverer of the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe algorithm for computing π.

First interest in mathematics

Borwein became interested in number theory and classical analysis during his second year of university. He had not previously been interested in math, although his father was the head of the University of Western Ontario's mathematics department and his mother is associate dean of medicine there. Borwein and his two siblings majored in mathematics.

Academic career

After completing a Bachelor of Science in Honours Math at the University of Western Ontario in 1974, he went on to complete an MSc and Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. He joined the Department of Mathematics at Dalhousie University. While he was there, he, his brother Jonathan Borwein and David H. Bailey of NASA wrote the 1989 paper that showed a proof for computing one billion digits of π. They won the 1993 Chauvent prize and Hasse prize.

In 1993, he moved to Simon Fraser University, joining his brother Jonathan in establishing the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics (CECM).

Research

In 1995, the Borweins collaborated with Yasumasa Kanada of the University of Tokyo to compute π to more than four billion digits.

Peter Borwein also collaborated with NASA's David Bailey and the University of Quebec's Simon Plouffe to calculate the individual hexadecimal digits of π. This provided a way for mathematicians to determine the nth digit of π without calculating preceding digits.

Publications

As a co-author, Borwein has written Pi: A Source Book (1999), Polynomials and Polynomial Inequalities(1998), Pi and the AGM (1987; reprinted in 1998) and A Dictionary of Real Numbers. He and his brother, Jonathan, co-edit the Canadian Mathematical Society/Springer-Verlag series of Books in Mathematics.

Affiliations

A professor at Simon Fraser University, Peter Borwein is affiliated with Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences (IRMACS), Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics (CECM), Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS), and Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS).