Peter Borwein

Peter Benjamin Borwein (1953 to 2020) was a Scottish-born Canadian mathematician and professor at Simon Fraser University, known in computing for his work on the numerical computation of pi. He was a co-author of the paper that presented the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe algorithm, a way to calculate individual hexadecimal digits of pi without computing the digits before them. With his brother Jonathan Borwein and David Bailey of NASA he wrote the 1989 paper that outlined and popularised a proof for computing one billion digits of pi. At Simon Fraser he joined his brother in establishing the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics, where he developed the Inverse Symbolic Calculator. He also devised a very rapidly convergent series, built by applying Chebyshev polynomials to the Dirichlet eta function, suited to high precision numerical calculation. He died in 2020.