David Harold Bailey

Who is David Harold Bailey?

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, but since 1998 has been at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is now officially retired, but continues as an active researcher. He is a Research Fellow 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. 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. The formula was discovered by Simon Plouffe using a computer program written by Bailey. More recently, 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.