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 authorSelwyn Dewdney and art therapist Irene Dewdney, and brother of poetChristopher Dewdney.
In his student days, Dewdney made a number of influential experimental films, includingMalanga, on the poet Gerald Malanga,Four Girls,Scissors, and his most ambitious film, the pre-structuralMaltese Cross Movement.[2][3]Margaret Atwood wrote that Dewdney's poetry scrapbook based on that film "raisesscrapbooking to an art".[4]
TheAcademy Film Archive has preserved two of Dewdney's films:The Maltese Cross Movement in 2009 andWildwood Flower in 2011.[5]
Dewdney wrote a number of books on mathematics, computing, and bad science. He also founded and edited a magazine on recreational programming calledAlgorithm[8] between 1989 and 1993.
Dewdney followedMartin Gardner andDouglas Hofstadter in authoringScientific American 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.[9] Dewdney was a co-inventor ofprogramming gameCore War.[10]
Beginning in the nineties, Dewdney worked on biology, both as a field ecologist[11] and as amathematical biologist,[12] contributing a solution to the problem of determining the underlying dynamics ofspecies abundance in natural communities.
Dewdney was a member of the9/11 truth movement, and believed that the planes used in theSeptember 11 attacks had been emptied of passengers and were flown by remote control.[13]
