It was April 1989, and the International Gold Council in New York was on the warpath. The culprit: the late AK Dewdney, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Western Ontario – and the man who, in one recent column for Scientific American, had thrown into jeopardy the entire basis of global civilization. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

How? By relating the results of his colleague, one Arlo Lipof, who had recently discovered a way to create gold out of thin air. “The inventor based his assertion on a legitimate mathematical result known as the Banach-Tarski Paradox,” Dewdney explained , which “reveals how under certain conditions an ideal solid can be cut into pieces and then reassembled into a ne

See Full Page