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 also the inventor of Array Notation and BEAF.

Bowers is best known for his work with polytopes, higher dimensional analogies of polyhedra. He reportly began his search for uniform polychora (4-dimensional polytopes) as far back as 1990, and independently discovered many of the currently known uniform polychora and coined 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 the most powerful computable function yet constructed (except for the fast-growing Hierrarchy)

Bowers has also coined many colorful names for numbers that he has defined, the most famous being meameamealokkapoowa oompa. Sbiis Saibian has commented that Bowers has turned large number naming "practically into an art form."