Jonathan Bowers

Jonathan Bowers (born November 27th 1969) is an American amateur mathematician. He and George Olshevsky led the early search for uniform star polychora. He first started investigating them in 1990. He discovered over 8,000 "polychora" but later the term was redefined to exclude exotic and fissary polychora and the count dropped to below 2,000. On the internet, he sometimes uses the screen names Polyhedron Dude (shortened to Hedrondude) or Jabe.

Biography
Bowers was born in Tyler, Texas in 1969. He has two brothers, named Justin and Jeff. He was raised Christian and believes in God. He has a Masters degree in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Tyler. In college, he was interested in polyhedra. He invented Bowers-style acronyms to shorten the names of uniform polyhedra. Around that time, he also started to research polychora. He found that there were few known uniform star polychora, so he started to look for them. He found thousands of them, although many are no longer considered true polychora. He also researched semi-uniform polyhedra. In 1997, he contacted other polytopists like Magnus Wenninger, Vincent Matsko, and George Olshevsky. Olshevsky had already been researching uniform polychora, and they compared their discoveries. In 2000, he discovered polytwisters.

By 2002, he had discovered 8190 uniform polychora. However, he later decided to remove exotic-celled polychora from the list and demote fissary polychora to a separate count. The number dropped to 1849. In 2007 Andrew Usher suggested he also remove polychora with intercepted cells. He rejected it but it was used as the basis for the definiton of nature. In contrast, Richard Klitzing proposed a weaker definition of uniform that does not require uniform facets. Bowers coined the word scaliform to refer to those polytopes. He continued to update his polytope site to create a complete list of uniform polychora, ending in 2018. In 2020, he joined the polytope discord and discovered many members of the disdi regiment.

Polytopes
Bowers's main interest is polytopes. He compiled lists of polychora in up to 6 dimensions using a naming system based on Coxeter's(?) system for uniform polyhedra. He also created Bowers-style acronyms to shorten the names. He also creates renders of polytopes and polytwisters in POV-ray sotware. Some of his discoveries include many snub polychora such as rapsady, sadsadox and gadros daskydox and the atypical iquipadah.

Large Numbers
He is also interested in large numbers. He likes inventing whimsical names for very large numbers (larger than a googolplex), which he calls "infinity scrapers" and defines using an array notation.

Theology
Bowers is Christian and believes in God. He attributes some of his discoveries to divine inspiration, such as iquipadah. When he was at church in 2001, he randomly thought of the name "iquipadah." He later discovered a polychoron which fits the acronym. He also claimed the discovery of the idcossids was an answer to a prayer. He believes God to be defined as the Mind of Truth, Existence, and Essence.

Other
He is also interested in chemical elements, the solar system, drawing cartoons, unusual fruits, and geometric computer graphics.