Alexander Keewatin Dewdney (August 5, 1941 – March 9, 2024) was a Canadian mathematician, computer scientist, author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. Dewdney was the son of Canadian artist and author Selwyn Dewdney and art therapist Irene Dewdney, and brother of poet

Christopher Dewdney Christopher Dewdney (born May 9, 1951) is a prize-winning Canadian poet and essayist. His poetry reflects his interest in natural history. His book '' Acquainted with the Night, an investigation into darkness'' was nominated for both the Charles T ...

Personal life

Dewdney was born in

London, Ontario London is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada, along the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor. The city had a population of 422,324 according to the 2021 Canadian census. London is at the confluence of the Thames River (Ontario), Thames River and N ...

on August 5, 1941, and died there on March 9, 2024, at the age of 82.

Art and fiction

In his student days, Dewdney made a number of influential experimental films, including ''Malanga'', on the poet Gerald Malanga, ''Four Girls'', ''Scissors'', and his most ambitious film, the pre-structural ''Maltese Cross Movement''.

Margaret Atwood Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and an inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of nonfiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight chi ...

wrote that Dewdney's poetry scrapbook based on that film "raises

scrapbooking Scrapbooking is a method of preserving, presenting, and arranging personal and family history in the form of a book, box, or card. Typical memorabilia include photographs, printed media, and artwork. Scrapbook albums are often decorated and freq ...

to an art". The Academy Film Archive has preserved two of Dewdney's films: ''The Maltese Cross Movement'' in 2009 and ''Wildwood Flower'' in 2011. Dewdney wrote two novels, '' The Planiverse'' (about an imaginary two-dimensional world) and ''Hungry Hollow: The Story of a Natural Place''. Dewdney lived in

where he held the position of Professor Emeritus at the

University of Western Ontario The University of Western Ontario (UWO; branded as Western University) is a Public university, public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thame ...

Computing, mathematics, and science

Dewdney wrote a number of books on mathematics, computing, and bad science. He also founded and edited a magazine on recreational programming called ''Algorithm'' between 1989 and 1993. Dewdney followed

Martin Gardner Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writin ...

and

Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born 15 February 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, Strange loop, strange ...

in authoring ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'' magazine's recreational mathematics column, renamed to "Computer Recreations", then "Mathematical Recreations", from 1984 to 1991. He published more than 10 books on scientific possibilities and puzzles. Dewdney was a co-inventor of

programming game A programming game is a video game that incorporates elements of computer programming, enabling the player to direct otherwise autonomous units within the game to follow commands in a domain-specific programming language, often represented as a ...

Core War ''Core War'' is a programming game introduced in 1984 by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney. In the game, two or more battle programs, known as ''warriors'', compete for control of a virtual computer. These programs are written in an abstract assem ...

''. Beginning in the nineties, Dewdney worked on biology, both as a field ecologist and as a mathematical biologist, contributing a solution to the problem of determining the underlying dynamics of

species abundance In ecology, local abundance is the relative representation of a species in a particular ecosystem. It is usually measured as the number of individuals found per sample. The ratio of abundance of one species to one or multiple other species livin ...

in natural communities.

Conspiracy theories

Dewdney was a member of the 9/11 truth movement, and theorized that the planes used in the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

had been emptied of passengers and were flown by remote control.. He based these claims in part on a series of experiments (one with funding from Japan's

TV Asahi JOEX-DTV (channel 5), branded as , and better known as , is a Japanese television station serving the Kanto region as the flagship station of the All-Nippon News Network. It is owned-and-operated by the a subsidiary of , itself controlled by ...

) that, he claimed, showed that cell phones do not work on airplanes, from which he concluded that the phone calls received from hijacked passengers during the attacks must have been faked.

Works

*'' The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World'' (1984). . *''The Armchair Universe: An Exploration of Computer Worlds'' (1988). . (collection of "Mathematical Recreations" columns) *''The Magic Machine: A Handbook of Computer Sorcery'' (1990). . (collection of "Mathematical Recreations" columns) *''The New Turing Omnibus: Sixty-Six Excursions in Computer Science'' (1993). . *''The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations'' (1993). . (collection of "Mathematical Recreations" columns) *''Introductory Computer Science: Bits of Theory, Bytes of Practice'' (1996). . *''200% of Nothing: An Eye Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Math Abuse and Innumeracy'' (1996). . *''Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science'' (1997). . *''Hungry Hollow: The Story of a Natural Place'' (1998). . *''A Mathematical Mystery Tour: Discovering the Truth and Beauty of the Cosmos'' (2001). . *''Beyond Reason: Eight Great Problems that Reveal the Limits of Science'' (2004). .

References

External links

Alexander Dewdney
homepage * {{DEFAULTSORT:Dewdney, Alexander 1941 births 2024 deaths Canadian mathematicians Recreational mathematicians Mathematics popularizers Canadian Muslims Canadian male non-fiction writers Film directors from London, Ontario Scientists from Ontario Writers from London, Ontario Canadian conspiracy theorists Canadian experimental filmmakers 20th-century Canadian non-fiction writers 21st-century Canadian non-fiction writers