David H. Bailey (mathematician)


David Harold Bailey is a mathematician and computer scientist. He received his B.S. in mathematics from Brigham Young University in 1972 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1976. He worked for 14 years as a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, and then from 1998 to 2013 as a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is now retired from the Berkeley Lab, but continues as a Research Associate at the University of California, Davis, Department of Computer Science.
Bailey is perhaps best known as a co-author of a 1997 paper that presented a new formula for π, which had been discovered by Plouffe in 1995. This Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula permits one to calculate binary or hexadecimal digits of pi beginning at an arbitrary position, by means of a simple algorithm. Subsequently, Bailey and Richard Crandall showed that the existence of this and similar formulas has implications for the long-standing question of "normality" – whether and why the digits of certain mathematical constants appear "random" in a particular sense.
Bailey is a long-time collaborator with the late Jonathan Borwein. They co-authored five books and over 80 technical papers on experimental mathematics.
Bailey also does research in numerical analysis and parallel computing. He has published studies on the fast Fourier transform, high-precision arithmetic, and the PSLQ algorithm. He is a co-author of the NAS Benchmarks, which are used to assess and analyze the performance of parallel scientific computers.
He has also published articles in the area of mathematical finance, including a 2014 paper "Pseudo-mathematics and financial charlatanism," which emphasizes the dangers of statistical overfitting and other abuses of mathematics in the financial field.
In 1993, Bailey received the Sidney Fernbach award from the IEEE Computer Society, as well as the Chauvenet Prize and the Hasse Prize from the Mathematical Association of America. In 2008 he was a co-recipient of the Gordon Bell Prize from the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2017 he was a co-recipient of the Levi L. Conant Prize from the American Mathematical Society.
Bailey is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has positioned himself as an advocate of the teaching of science and that accepting the conclusions of modern science is not incompatible with a religious view.

Selected works