Research
Harlan Brothers, founder of Brothers Technology, had his first success as an inventor in the early nineties with his sale of the Bathtub Buddy™ to a major manufacturer of small appliances, Salton Inc. Salton incorporated this unique water alarm into its popular Wet Tunes line of products. Since then Brothers has obtained five patents and worked as a design consultant.
His research in the mid-nineties into the problem of creating and authenticating tamper-proof digital recordings led to a patent for The Event Verification System™ (EVS). EVS offers a broad solution that fulfills the ever-growing need for irrefutable authentication of digital information. The patent was recently sold to a well-established intellectual property firm.
Current projects range from novel consumer devices to commercial encryption techniques and educational tools.
In the area of pure research, Brothers has a long-standing interest in number theory and its applications. He has discovered formulas and relationships relating to the constants e, pi, and Euler's gamma. His paper entitled "Improving the Convergence of Newton's Series Approximation for e" includes the fastest known methods for computing this fundamental constant of nature. The article appears in the January 2004 issue of The College Mathematics Journal. Here is a presentation on the subject from the Third Annual Citizen Science Conference.
For the last six years he has worked with Michael Frame and Benoit Mandelbrot at Yale University to explore the use of fractals in mathematics education. Previous projects at Yale include a lecture and workshop on the subject of fractal music composition and analysis. Here is a brief introduction to fractals in PDF format [1.7MB]. Brothers currently teaches programming and fractal geometry at The Country School where he serves as Director of Technology.
An ongoing project with architect Michael Silver involves using cellular automata to program the electronic skin of a Liquid Crystal Glass House. The project was on exhibit at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
The following links reference early research on one of the fundamental constants of Nature, the base of the natural logarithm, e :
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NASA (Serendipit-e, John Knox)
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Here are
links to more information on
e.
Publications
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H. J. Brothers, "Intervallic scaling in the Bach cello suites." Accepted by Fractals.
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H. J. Brothers, "How to design your own pi to e converter." The AMATYC Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2008; pages 29–35.
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H. J. Brothers, "Structural scaling in Bach’s cello suite no. 3." Fractals, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2007; pages 89–95.
(Supplementary material can be found here.)
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The following files are in Adobe PDF format. Click to view an article or right click and select "Save Target As..." to download.
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J. A. Knox and H. J. Brothers, Novel series-based approximations to e. College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1999; pages 269-275. [126KB]
(NOTE: The above paper was selected by mathematicians Ron Larson, Robert P. Hostetler, and Bruce H. Edwards as one of the fifty best articles on calculus from MAA periodicals. It is now a supplement to their textbook, Calculus with Analytic Geometry, Seventh Edition.)
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