Alexander Dewdney

Alexander Dewdney

Alexander Keewatin Dewdney (born August 5, 1941 in London, Ontario) is a Canadian mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher who has written a number of books on the future and implications of modern computing. He has also written one work of fiction, The Planiverse. Dewdney lives in London, Ontario, Canada where he holds the position of Professor Emeritus of the University of Western Ontario. Dewdney is the son of Canadian artist and author Selwyn Dewdney, as well as the brother of poet Christopher Dewdney. Dewdney has been a Muslim for over 35 years.

In his early life, as "Keewatin Dewdney", he made a number of influential experimental films, including "Malanga", on the poet Gerard Malanga, as well as "Four Girls", "Scissors", and his most ambitious film, the pre-structuralist "Maltese Cross Movement. His films may be rented in 16 mm from the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in Toronto. More about Dewdney's early film work can be found in Wheeler Winston Dixon's book "The Exploding Eye", a history of experimental film in the 1960s.

Dewdney followed Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstadter in authoring Scientific American's recreational mathematics column, which he renamed to "Computer Recreations", then "Mathematical Recreations", from 1984 to 1993 (with the last few appearing in Algorithm). These have been collected into 3 books. The subjects include computer viruses, Core Wars, finite automata like Conway's Game of Life, brown noise, the game of Alak, Tinkertoy and spaghetti sorting.

Dewdney also published claims about events surrounding the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, stating that phone calls from the planes must have been faked and that the plane that hit the Pentagon was not Flight 77 (see external links below). In 2003, Dewdney featured a paper on his website Physics911 on the topic of impossible phone calls on 9/11 by Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf.