Hofstadter, Douglas R.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is probably best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, published in 1979 that won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. This book, also known as GEB, has inspired thousands of students to begin their careers in computing and artificial intelligence.

Hofstadter received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. He is currently (2004) a professor of cognitive science and computer science (among others) at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is the son of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter.

Hofstadter is multilingual, having spent one year of his youth in Geneva. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s and understands Swedish. He speaks Italian, English, French, German and some Russian. In Le Ton beau de Marot (written in memory of his late wife Carol) he describes himself as a pilingual and an oligoglot (speaker of few languages).

His interests include themes of the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation, and mathematical games.

He appears not to publish in conventional academic journals, preferring the freedom of expression of large books of collected ideas. As such, his great influence on Computer Science is somewhat subversive and underground - his work has inspired countless research projects but is not always formally referenced.

When Martin Gardner retired from writing his Mathematical Games column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him with a column entitled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games").

Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you think, even when you take account of Hofstadter's law".

Hofstadter invented the concept of Reviews of This Book, a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself - not unlike BambooWeb. He introduces the idea in Metamagical Themas:

"[it] is just a fantasy of mine. I would love to see a book consisting of nothing but a collection of reviews of it that appeared (after its publication, of course) in major newspapers and magazines. It sounds paradoxical, but it could be arranged with a lot of planning and hard work. First, a group of major journals would all have to agree to run reviews of the book by the various contributors to the book. Then all the reviewers would begin writing. But they would have to mail off their various drafts to all the other reviewers very regularly so that all the reviews could evolve together, and thus eventually reach a stable state of a kind known in physics as a "Hartree-Fock self-consistent solution". Then the book could be published, after which its reviews would come out in their respective journals, as per arrangement."

Published works

The books published by Hofstadter are:

ISBNs refer to paperback editions where available.

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0465026567)
• Metamagical Themas (ISBN 0465045669) (collection of Scientific American columns)
• Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creatività (in Italian only)
• Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (ISBN 0465024750)
• Rhapsody on a Theme by Clement Marot. The Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values, 1995. (Published 1996 )
• Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0465086454)
• A verse translation of Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin (ISBN 0465020941)

Hofstadter wrote, among others, the following papers:

• A nondeterministic approach to analogy, involving the Ising model of ferromagnetism., Physics of cognitive processes (Amalfi, 1986), 209--227, World Sci. Publishing, Singapore, 1987.
• Speechstuff and thoughtstuff: Musings on the resonances created by words and phrases via the subliminal perception of their buried parts., In Sture Allen (ed.), Of Thoughts and Words: The Relation between Language and Mind. Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium 92, 1995, London/New Jersey: World Scientific Publ., 217-267.
• On seeing A's and seeing As., Stanford Humanities Review 4,2 (1995) pp. 109-121.
• Analogy as the Core of Cognition. In "The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science," edited by Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Book, 2001, pp. 499-538.

In addition Hofstadter wrote over 50 papers that were published through the The Mind's I (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0465030912)

• Andrew Hodges. (Preface)
• Gödel's Proof (2002 revised edition) by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, edited by Hofstadter (ISBN 0814758169). Hofstadter claimed the book was highly influential to his thinking during his early years.
• Who invented the computer? The legal battle that changed computing history. (2003) by Alice Rowe Burks.
• Virus of the Brain was based on Hofstadter's work, and was co-directed by philosopher Daniel Dennett, who co-authored The Mind's I with him.

He published a audio cd with piano music composed by himself and performed by Jane Jackson, Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur and himself.

See also

• Kurt Gödel
• Gödel's incompleteness theorem
• M. C. Escher
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Daniel Dennett