Jonathan Bowers

Jonathan Bowers is a founding googologist who contributed BEAF (Bower's Exploding Array Function) and many multi-dimensional polytopes to the world of mathematics.

Biography
Bowers was born on November 27, 1969 in Tyler Texas USA. He has one known sibling, his brother Jeff Bowers - who is a painter by trade - and Cindy Bowers, who may be his mother, or his aunt, or another relative (who has a cute dog and cat named Sandy)

Jonathan Bowers appears to have been raised as a Christian, and believes in God. He graduated from John Tyler High School in 1988 and went on to graduate from the University of Texas at Tyler in 1996.

Bowers in Googology
Sometime in the 80's Bowers read a book about hyper-operators which sparked in him a desire to learn more about higher functions that aren't normally used in everyday mathematics. So about 20 years later in 2008-ish he wrote a page on his personal website that detailed his own extension to the hyper-operators he had read about. We know this extension as "BEAF", or Bower's Exploding Array Notation.

The notation was invented right about the same time the Googology Wiki was founded, so many googologists began to analyze BEAF in the beginning of what was to become the googological "presence" online.

Bowers is known by many as one of the Grandfathers of Googology, and that seems accurate because without him would other Googologists have been inspired to create their own functions? We don't know, but his BEAF notation certainly did pave the way for array notations as a whole, and remains to this day as a piece of interest for beginner googologists and experienced googologists alike.

Jonathan names his numbers with names like "MEAMEAMEALOKKAPOOWA OOMPA!", and has very imaginative naming schemes, which is why many of his numbers have been remembered, in addition to his system of Illions. Well, his numbers are also kept in mind because he was one of the first to do what he did, but also because they have cool names.