Douglas Hofstadter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is probably best known for his book Goedel, 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 intelligience.
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.
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 (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.
Author of (ISBN's refer to paperback editions):
- Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0465026567)
- The Mind's I (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0465030912)
- Metamagical Themas (ISBN 0465045669)
- Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creativita (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)
Hofstadters 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 -n ot unlike Wikipedia. Here is an online implementation of his idea.
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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
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