Jonathan M Borwein was born in 1951 in St Andrews Scotland. He completed an Oxford D.Phil. in Mathematics in 1974 as a 1971 Ontario Rhodes Scholar after undergraduate study at University of Western Ontario.
He was Laureate Professor of mathematics at University of Newcastle and Director of the Centre for Computer Assisted Research Mathematics and its Applications (CARMA). He has worked at Carnegie-Melon, Dalhousie, Simon Fraser, and Waterloo Universities and has held two Canada Research Chairs in computing.
Borwein was a past President of the Canadian Mathematical Society (200-2002), a winner of the Chauvenet Prize (1993) and recipient of an honorary degree from Limoges (1999).
Fellowships included the Royal Society of Canada (1994), American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002), Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (2003), Australian Academy of Science (2010).
Borwein has published several hundred research papers and more than a dozen books on topics in optimisation, analysis, computation, and experimental mathematics.
He was an expert on the number Pi. His research interests spanned pure mathematics (analysis and number theory), applied mathematics (optimization), computational mathematics (numerical and computational analysis), and high performance computing. For the past 25 years was a leading exponent of experimental mathematics.
Borwein died on August 2, 2016.
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Fellow of the American Association or the Advancement of ScienceForeign Member of the Bulgarian Academy of the Science