Reports from Zimbabwe say that Gideon Gono is leaving his position as governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank. Dr. Gono was awarded the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).
REFERENCE: Zimbabwe’s Casino Economy — Extraordinary Measures for Extraordinary Challenges, Gideon Gono, ZPH Publishers, Harare, 2008.
Dr. Gono is responsible for creating the ten trillion dollar bills that were given as prize money to this year’s (2013) Ig Nobel Prize winners.
BONUS: “Gono says goodbye to RBZ staff”
His resignation statement includes this passage:
“I leave my office a happy man given that only on Tuesday, Cabinet agreed, finally to the Government take-over of all Bank debts incurred by the Central Bank on behalf of the State. Some of these debts were incurred as way back as during our pre-independence era right through the 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s. An erroneous impression had been created in the market to the effect that the entire US$1.3 billion was created during my era of administration. Of course nothing could be further from the truth.”
BONUS: The 100-trillion-dollar book
BONUS from back in 2009: An admirer admires Dr. Gono’s accomplishments: