Douglas Hofstadter

Hofstadter received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. He is currently (2002) 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.

Douglas is multilingual, having spent 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 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.

Author of (ISBN's refer to paperback editions):

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0465026567)
• The Mind's I (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0465030912)
• Metamagical Themas (ISBN 0465045669)
• Ambigrammi (in Italian only)
• Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (ISBN 0465024750)
• 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)

He also revised "Goedel's Proof", a book by Earnest Nagel and James Newman. Hofstadter claimed the book was highly influential to his thinking during his early years.

Quote

"The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion."

See also

• Kurt Gödel
• M. C. Escher
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Marvin Minsky
• Daniel Dennett

External link

• Douglas Hofstadter - Home page

Referenced By