The Peter Borwein Memorial Graduate Scholarship in Mathematics

Dr. Peter Borwein had a distinguished career at Simon Fraser University (SFU) as a faculty member and Professor of Mathematics. Peter joined SFU Science’s Department of Mathematics in 1993 from Dalhousie University, and later held a Burnaby Mountain Chair in Mathematics. Peter had a major role in shaping SFU’s Department, and his impact is still evident today.

Peter contributed to our community in numerous ways: he and his brother Jonathan established the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics (CECM); in the late 1990s he served as the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences’ SFU site director; and in the early 2010s he was able to secure 11 million dollars to build and run the Interdisciplinary Research in the Mathematical and Computational Science (IRMACS) Centre, a visionary project with the purpose to, in Peter's words, “host any scientist who uses computers as a tool in their research.” Peter was the true heart and soul of the IRMACS Centre.

Peter was a creative and prolific mathematician, with nearly 200 scientific publications, including several books, to his credit. Peter's research interests spanned Diophantine and computational number theory, classical analysis and symbolic computation. He had a central interest in scientific collaboration and computational experimentation technologies. For example, the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe (BBP) formula is still one of the major tools for calculating digits of the number Pi.

Peter was a dedicated teacher and mentor, who supervised numerous students during his time at Dalhousie and SFU. It was one of Peter’s great joys to see his students go on to interesting careers both within and outside of academia.

Peter was a member of several editorial boards, including "Ramanujan Quarterly" and "Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis." Peter was a recipient of the Chauvenet Prize and the 1993 Hasse prize (with Jonathan Borwein and David H. Bailey) and a co-recipient of the 1996 CUFA/BC Academic of the Year Award. Generous in his work and his life, he was a friend, mentor and role model of many, devoted to mathematics and to sharing his knowledge with others. He will be missed by his family, colleagues and many friends.