Jonathan Bowers

Jonathan Bowers (born November 27, 1969 in Tyler, Texas) is an American amateur mathematician who specializes in multidimensional shapes and googology. He is best known for his work with polytopes, higher dimensional analogies of polyhedra. He reportedly began his search for uniform polychora (4-dimensional polytopes) in the 1990s, independently discovering many of the currently known uniform polychora and coining names for them.

Bowers became known in the googological community when he introduced Array Notation to the public in 2002, and later its generalization, BEAF. They produce provably larger numbers than Knuth arrows, Steinhaus polygons, or chained arrows. This, coupled with its simple and elegant definition, effectively makes it one of the most powerful computable functions yet constructed.

Bowers has also coined many colorful names for numbers that he has defined, such as dossol and trongulus. His most famous number is meameamealokkapoowa oompa. Sbiis Saibian has commented that Bowers has turned large number naming "practically into an art form."