David H. Bailey

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For other persons named David Bailey, see David Bailey (disambiguation)

David H. 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, but since 1998 has been the Chief Technologist of the Computational Research Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Bailey is perhaps best known as a co-author (with Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe) of a 1996 paper that presented a new formula for π. This Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula permits one to calculate binary or hexadecimal digits of π beginning at an arbitrary position, by means of a simple algorithm. The formula was discovered by Simon Plouffe using a computer program written by Bailey. More recently (2001 and 2002), 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 (including pi) appear "random" in a particular sense.

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 (used for integer relation detection). He is a co-author of the NAS Benchmarks, which are used to assess and analyze the performance of parallel scientific computers.

Bailey is a recipient of 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. Bailey and Jonathan Borwein are co-authors of two books on experimental mathematics.