[FOM] on harvey friedman's "number theorists" (4 Apr).

[Timothy Y. Chow]

Gabriel Stolzenberg <gstolzen at math.bu.edu> wrote:
>    I'm surprised that you don't tell us how this interest is manifested
> mathematically.  Isn't that important?  I'd like to see some of the work
> that he did on questions of this kind.

Oh, is that all you mean?  This request is easy to satisfy.  At one time
I had an officemate, Mike Bennett, whose career was and is devoted to this 
kind of thing.  Browse his publications at

http://www.math.ubc.ca/~bennett/publ.html

and you'll quickly find that even the papers that don't have the words 
"effective" or "explicit" in the title are deeply concerned with effective 
methods in Diophantine approximation.  For him, a nonconstructive theorem 
such as Roth's theorem is little more than a starting point that guides 
his search for effective (and better, computationally efficient) methods.

Tim