Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic. He is probably best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, published in 1979, which 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. February 15 is the 46th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1945 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... GEB cover Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, first published in by Basic Books. ... 1979 is a common year starting on Monday. ... 1980 is a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-04-13, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a computer was a person who computes. ... Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any manufactured (i. ...

The son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, he received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. As of 2005, he is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science, Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University at Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition (http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu). Photographs of Nobel Prize Medals. ... Robert Hofstadter (February 5, 1915 - November 17, 1990) was the winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons. ... Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. ... The willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers resulted in a period of major scientific advancements, now known as the Scientific Revolution. ... University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO) is located in Eugene. ... 1975 was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ... 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Indiana University Bloomington is the principal campus of the Indiana University system. ...

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 (he translated parts of GEB into Russian). In Le Ton beau de Marot (written in memory of his late wife Carol) he describes himself as a pilingual (conversant in 3.14159 languages) and an oligoglot (speaker of few languages). A multilingual person or a polyglot is someone with a high degree of proficiency in several languages. ... Geneva: the Mont Blanc bridge over the Rhône River and St Peters Cathedral Geneva (French: Genève) is the second-most populous city in Switzerland located where Lake Geneva (French: Lac Léman, but the Genevois are fond of calling it Lac de Genève) empties into the... This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1960s. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The mathematical constant π represents the ratio of a circles circumference to its diameter and is commonly used in mathematics, physics, and engineering. ...

His interests include themes of the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation, and mathematical games. At Indiana University at Bloomington he co-authored with Melanie Mitchell and others, a cognitive model of "high-level perception", Copycat, and several other models of analogy making and cognition. Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... A self-reference occurs when an object refers to itself. ... Translation is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language—the source text—and the production of a new, equivalent text in another language—called the target text, or the translation. ... Mathematical games include many topics which are a part of recreational mathematics, but can also cover topics such as the mathematics of games, and playing games with mathematics. ... In cognition, a model is a simplified representation of reality. ... Copycat is a model of analogy making and human cognition ( Cognitive architecture), developed by Douglas Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell, and others at the at Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University at Bloomington. ... An analogy is a comparison between two different things, in order to highlight some form of similarity. ... Wiktionary has a definition of: Cognition The term cognition is used in several different loosely related ways. ...

He appears not to publish much in conventional academic journals (except in his early physics career, see below), 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"). Martin Gardner (born October 21, 1914) is an American recreational mathematician, skeptic, and author of the long-running but now discontinued Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. ... Mathematical games include many topics which are a part of recreational mathematics, but can also cover topics such as the mathematics of games, and playing games with mathematics. ... Scientific American is one of the oldest and most serious popular-science magazines. ... Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published together as a book in 1985 by Basic Books (ISBN 0465045669) . The subject matter of the articles is loosely woven about themes in philosophy, creativity, artificial intelligence and important...

Hofstadter invented the concept of Reviews of This Book, a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself. 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."

Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law".

Activity since 'Marot'

The Copycat project has grown into 'Metacat' and has been worked on by Hofstadter and several assistants. A 2002 overview can be found here: http://www.cs.pomona.edu/~marshall/metacat/dissertation.pdf

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 many others, the following papers: GEB cover Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, first published in by Basic Books. ... Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published together as a book in 1985 by Basic Books (ISBN 0465045669) . The subject matter of the articles is loosely woven about themes in philosophy, creativity, artificial intelligence and important... Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0465086454), published by Basic Books in 1997, is a book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings, and beauty of translation. ... Eugene Onegin (Yevgeny Onegin, Евгений Онегин) is a novel in verse written by Aleksandr Pushkin. ... Aleksandr Pushkin was a Russian poet and a founder of modern Russian literature Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Серге́евич Пу́шкин) (June 6 (May 26, O.S.), 1799 - February 10 (January 29, O.S.), 1837), Russian author, whom many consider the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. ...

• "Energy levels and wave functions of Bloch electrons in rational and irrational magnetic fields", Phys. Rev. B 14 (1976) 2239.

Written while he was at the University of Oregon, this paper was enormously influential in directing further research. Hofstadter predicted that the allowed energy level values of an electron in this crystal lattice, as a function of a magnetic field applied to the system, formed a fractal set. That is, the distribution of energy levels for large scale changes in the applied magnetic field repeat patterns seen in the small scale structure. This fractal structure is generally known as "Hofstadter's butterfly", and has recently been confirmed in transport measurements in two-dimensional electron systems with a superimposed nano-fabricated lattice.

• "A non-deterministic approach to analogy, involving the Ising model of ferromagnetism", in E. Caianiello (ed.), The Physics of Cognitive Processes. Teaneck, NJ: World Scientific, 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, London/New Jersey: World Scientific Publ., 1995, 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 Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov (eds.) The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Book, 2001, pp. 499-538.

In addition Hofstadter wrote over 50 papers that were published through the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, See [1] (http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/phard.html). University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO) is located in Eugene. ... Dedre Gentner is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. ...

Hofstadter wrote forewords for or edited the following books:

• The Mind's I (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0465030912)
• Alan Turing: The Enigma by 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.
• Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker by Christof Teuscher (Editor)

The film 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. The Minds I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. ... Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher. ... 2002 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Ernest Nagel (born November 16, 1901 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, died September 22, 1985 in New York City) was the preeminent philosopher of science of his time. ... James Roy Newman was a mathematician and mathematical historian. ... 2003 is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Virus of the Brain is a film based on the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter and co-directed by Daniel Dennett. ... Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher. ... The Minds I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. ...

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

Students

Some of Hofstadter's former students have also become famous:

• David Chalmers - philosopher of mind
• Melanie Mitchell - creator of Copycat
• Robert French - researches analogies

David Chalmers is a leading philosopher in the area of philosophy of mind. ... Copycat is a model of analogy making and human cognition ( Cognitive architecture), developed by Douglas Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell, and others at the at Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University at Bloomington. ...

See also

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

Kurt Gödel Kurt Gödel [kurt gøːdl], (April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics. ... In mathematical logic, Gödels incompleteness theorems are two celebrated theorems proved by Kurt Gödel in 1931. ... Self portrait, 1943¹ Maurits Cornelis Escher (Leeuwarden, June 17, 1898 - Laren, March 27, 1972) was a Dutch artist most known for his woodcuts, lithographs and mezzotints, which tend to feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, and tessellations. ... Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748 portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann Johann Sebastian Bach (March 21, 1685 (O.S.) – July 28, 1750 (N.S.))[1] was a German composer and organist of the Baroque period, and is universally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time. ... Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher. ... The term copycat (also written as copy-cat or copy cat) refers to the tendency of humans to duplicate the behavior of others, as expressed in the saying, monkey see, monkey do. ...

External links

• Douglas Hofstadter's home page (http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/people/homepages/hofstadter.html)
• Indiana University's Douglas Hofstadter webpage (http://www.indiana.edu/~alldrp/members/hofstadter.html)
• Online implementation of his Reviews of this Book idea (http://www.reenigne.org/review.html)