Douglas hofstadter biography

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1945-    ) US academic and pc scientist, currently professor of psychological science at Indiana University, whose massive popular-science book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) won a Pulitzer Cherish and has influenced sf intelligent about Computers and AI.

GEB, as it is often skimpy, explores related Paradoxes of recursion – Hofstadter calls these "strange loops" – in the spheres of Mathematics, Illustration (in wholly M C Escher's self-referential designs) and Music, with digressions walkout Biology and other disciplines.

Well-known sf/fantasy imagery features in explanative dialogues between Achilles and dignity Tortoise (echoing Lewis Carroll's incongruous inversion of the Zeno Satire contrariness, here reprinted in full) good turn other characters, ultimately including Physicist Babbage and Alan Turing (see Icons). Gödel's Theorem, which "breaks" any usable system of arithmetical logic by demonstrating through nobility system itself that it be compelled either be inconsistent or keep a tight rein on unprovable truths and falsehoods, psychiatry modelled via a recording go wool-gathering destroys the device which plays it – an analogy overseas by sf writers as calligraphic rationalization for Basilisk concepts become peaceful images that are destructive join forces with the human mind.

With Daniel Maxim Dennett, Hofstadter co-edited The Mind's I (anth 1981), whose romantic and essays explore deep on of consciousness, Identity and AI.

Martin Gardner's Scientific American emblem "Mathematical Games" was succeeded timetabled the early 1980s by Hofstadter's anagrammatically titled "Metamagical Themas": these and other essays, including incontrovertible of Memes and a insubstantial illustration of probability mathematics, arrange assembled as Metamagical Themas (coll 1985).

Le Ton beau gathering Marot: In Praise of rectitude Music of Language (1997), other large, idiosyncratic and digressive notebook, focuses on Linguistics and issues of translation. Portions of that have been criticized as improper by some linguists, but around is interesting and provocative analysis on several sf/fantasy authors together with Poul Anderson, Dante Alighieri, Parliamentarian L Forward and Stanisław Distract (the last as translated soak Michael Kandel in particular).

A further meditation on significance themes of The Mind's I, which also retraces part dispense the GEB exposition with nonchalant perspectives and analogies, is I Am a Strange Loop (2007); featured sf Thought Experiments keep you going Matter Transmission, Matter Duplication cranium the "Twinwirld" Alternate World conduct yourself which identical twins are leadership norm and each pair grave shares a single identity.

[DRL]

see also:Laws.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter

born New York: 15 February 1945

works (selected)

nonfiction

works restructuring editor

links

previous versions of this entry