Peter Borwein dies at 67

Peter Borwein (sitting), with his brother Jonathan Borwein (courtesy Canada Foundation for Innovation)

Peter Borwein, retired Professor of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University (British Columbia, Canada) and former Director of SFU’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences (IRMACS), died on August 23, 2020, at the age of 67, of pneumonia, after courageously battling multiple sclerosis for over 20 years.

Peter was a prolific mathematician, with over 200 publications, including several books. His research included works in classical analysis, computational number theory, Diophantine number theory and symbolic computing. Many of these papers were co-authored with his brother

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August 29th, 2020 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

Two mathematicians’ triple play

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The Erdős-Turán conjecture

Paul Erdős, one of the twentieth century’s most unique mathematicians, was known to travel from colleague to colleague, often arriving unannounced, and to immediately delve into some particularly intriguing research problem. See this article and this book for some additional background on this influential mathematician.

One of his more interesting conjectures is his “conjecture on arithmetic progressions,” sometimes referred to as the “Erdős-Turán conjecture.” It can be simply stated as follows: If $A$ is a set of positive integers such that $$\sum_{k \in A} \frac{1}{k} = \infty,$$ then $A$ contains arithmetic progressions of

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August 3rd, 2020 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed

How old is the universe? New results clash

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The standard model

The standard model of physics, namely the framework of laws at the foundation of modern physics, has reigned supreme since the 1970s, confirmed to great precision in a vast array of experimental tests. Among other things, the standard model predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, which was experimentally discovered in 2012, nearly 50 years after it was first predicted.

Yet physicists have recognized for many years that the standard model cannot be the final answer. For example, quantum theory and general relativity are known to be mathematically incompatible. String theory and

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August 1st, 2020 | Category: Essays | Comments are closed