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) . Scientific American is a popular-science magazine, published monthly since August 28, 1845, making it the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. ... MacGyver - 1980s hero The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive. ... Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic. ...

The subject matter of the articles is loosely woven about themes in philosophy, creativity, artificial intelligence and important social issues. The volume is substantial in size and contains extensive notes concerning responses to the articles and other information relevant to their content. (One of the notes--page 65--suggested memetics for the study of memes.) Philosopher in Meditation (detail), by Rembrandt Philosophy is a field of study that includes diverse subfields such as aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics, in which people ask questions such as whether God exists, whether knowledge is possible, and what makes actions right or wrong. ... Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. ... Hondas intelligent humanoid robot AI redirects here. ... Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme. ...

Major themes include: self-reference in memes, language, art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; analogies and what makes something similar to something else; and lengthy discussions of the work of Robert Axelrod on the prisoner's dilemma and the idea of superrationality. The term meme (IPA: ) labels a theoretical concept introduced in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, and refers to any unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice, idea or concept, which one mind transmits (verbally or by demonstration) to another mind. ... This article is about a political scientist. ... Will the two prisoners cooperate to minimize total loss of liberty or will one of them, trusting the other to cooperate, betray him so as to go free? Many points in this article may be difficult to understand without a background in the elementary concepts of game theory. ... The concept of superrationality is discussed in Douglas Hofstadters book Metamagical Themas. Superrationality is based on the idea that two perfect logicians will come up with the same, correct, answer to a logical or mathematical problem. ...

The concept of superrationality and its relevance to the Cold War, environmental issues and such is accompanied by some amusing and rather stimulating notes on experiments conducted by the author at the time. The Cold War (Russian: Холодная война , Kholodna-ya voina) was the protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle that emerged after World War II between the global superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States, supported by their alliance partners. ...

Many other topics are also mentioned, all in Hofstadter's usual easy, approachable style. Another feature is the inclusion of two dialogues in the style of those appearing in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Ambigrams are mentioned. GEB cover Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979 by Basic Books. ... An animation of a rotationally symmetric ambigram for the word ambigram A mirror-image ambigram for the word Wiki A rotational ambigram for the word Wikipedia A 3-Dimensional ambigram of the letters A, B and C. An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion, is a graphical figure that...

There are three articles based around the Lisp programming language, where Hofstadter first details the language itself, and then shows how it relates to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... In mathematical logic, Gödels incompleteness theorems are two celebrated theorems proven by Kurt Gödel in 1931. ...

The title is an example of wordplay: it is an anagram of Mathematical Games, the title of Martin Gardner's column that Hofstadter's column succeeded in Scientific American. An anagram (Greek ana- = back or again, and graphein = to write) is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce other words, using all the original letters exactly once. ... 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. ... Martin Gardner (born October 21, 1914) is an American recreational mathematician, magician, skeptic, and author of the long-running but now discontinued Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. ...

French Edition

Metamagical Themas was also published in French, under the title Ma Themagie (InterEditions, 1988), the translators being Jean-Baptiste Berthelin, Jean-Luc Bonnetain, and Lise Rosenbaum. Jean-Baptiste Berthelin, also known informally as Cochonfucius, is a French cognitive science researcher. ...

Unfortunately, the wordplay was lost in the French title, and replaced with a much weaker one, about Math and Magic. The translators had contemplated Le matin des metamagiciens, which would have been a play on Hofstadter's title plus Le Matin des Magiciens and Jeux malins des mathematiciens (respectively, The Dawn of the Magicians and Clever Tricks of Mathematicians). However, the publisher found it too elaborate, so we are left with the simpler one.