Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science,

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

, and

comparative literature Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role similar to that of the study ...

whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction"General Nonfiction"
. ''Past winners and finalists by category''. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 17, 2012. and a

National Book Award The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The Nat ...

(at that time called The American Book Award) for Science."National Book Awards – 1980"
.

National Book Foundation The National Book Foundation (NBF) is an American nonprofit organization established, "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America". Established in 1989 by National Book Awards, Inc.,Edwin McDowell. "Book Notes: 'The Joy Luc ...

. Retrieved March 7, 2012. His 2007 book ''

I Am a Strange Loop ''I Am a Strange Loop'' is a 2007 book by Douglas Hofstadter, examining in depth the concept of a '' strange loop'' to explain the sense of "I". The concept of a ''strange loop'' was originally developed in his 1979 book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach' ...

'' won the ''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize for Science and Technology.

Early life and education

Hofstadter was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

to Jewish parents:

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...

-winning physicist

Robert Hofstadter Robert Hofstadter (February 5, 1915 – November 17, 1990) was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rudolf Mössbauer) "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nucle ...

and Nancy Givan Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor, and attended the

International School of Geneva The International School of Geneva (in French: ''Ecole Internationale de Genève''), also known as "Ecolint" or "The International School", is a private, non-profit international school based in Geneva, Switzerland. Founded in 1924 in the servic ...

in 1958–59. He graduated with distinction in mathematics from Stanford University in 1965, and received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...

in 1975, where his study of the energy levels of

Bloch electron In condensed matter physics, Bloch's theorem states that solutions to the Schrödinger equation in a periodic potential take the form of a plane wave modulated by a periodic function. The theorem is named after the physicist Felix Bloch, who d ...

s in a magnetic field led to his discovery of the fractal known as

Hofstadter's butterfly In condensed matter physics, Hofstadter's butterfly is a graph of the spectral properties of non-interacting two-dimensional electrons in a perpendicular magnetic field in a lattice. The fractal, self-similar nature of the spectrum was discovered ...

Academic career

Since 1988, Hofstadter has been the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universi ...

in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which he called "artificial intelligence research", a label he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both cognitive science and computer science. He was also appointed adjunct professor of history and philosophy of science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology, but has said that his involvement with most of those departments is nominal.Seminar: AI: Hope and Hype
1999 In 1988 Hofstadter received the ''In Praise of Reason'' award, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's highest honor. In April 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

and a member of the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

. In 2010 he was elected a member of the

Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala The Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala ( sv, Kungliga Vetenskaps-Societeten i Uppsala), is the oldest of the royal academies in Sweden, having been founded in 1710. The society has, by royal decree of 1906, 50 Swedish fellows and 100 foreign. ...

, Sweden. At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he and

Melanie Mitchell Melanie Mitchell is an American scientist. She is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publi ...

coauthored a computational model of "high-level perception"—

Copycat Copycat refers to a person who copies some aspect of some thing or somebody else. Copycat may also refer to: Intellectual property rights * Copyright infringement, use of another’s ideas or words without permission * Patent infringement, a v ...

—and several other models of analogy-making and cognition, including the Tabletop project, co-developed with

Robert M. French Robert M. French is a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He is currently at the University of Burgundy in Dijon. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he worked with Douglas Hofstadter on t ...

. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models include Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of

Bongard problem A Bongard problem is a kind of puzzle invented by the Russian computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard (Михаил Моисеевич Бонгард, 1924–1971), probably in the mid-1960s. They were published in his 1967 book on pattern re ...

s and number sequences, respectively, as well as George (Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in triangle geometry. Hofstadter has had several exhibitions of his artwork in various university galleries. These shows have featured large collections of his gridfonts, his

ambigrams An ambigram is a calligraphic design that has several interpretations as written. The term was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in 1983. Most often, ambigrams appear as visually symmetrical words. When flipped, they remain unchanged, or they mutate ...

(pieces of calligraphy created with two readings, either of which is usually obtained from the other by rotating or reflecting the ambigram, but sometimes simply by "oscillation", like the

Necker Cube The Necker cube is an optical illusion that was first published as a Rhomboid in 1832 by Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker. It is a simple wire-frame, two dimensional drawing of a cube with no visual cues as to its orientation, so it ...

or the rabbit/duck figure of

Joseph Jastrow Joseph Jastrow (January 30, 1863 – January 8, 1944) was a Polish-born American psychologist, noted for inventions in experimental psychology, design of experiments, and psychophysics. He also worked on the phenomena of optical illusions, ...

), and his "Whirly Art" (music-inspired visual patterns realized using shapes based on various alphabets from India). Hofstadter invented the term "ambigram" in 1984; many ambigrammists have since taken up the concept. Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "

bon mot Many words in the English vocabulary are of French origin, most coming from the Anglo-Norman spoken by the upper classes in England for several hundred years after the Norman Conquest, before the language settled into what became Modern Engl ...

s", and analogies of all sorts, and his longtime observation of these diverse products of cognition. His theories about the mechanisms that underlie them have exerted a powerful influence on the

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

s of the computational models he and FARG members have developed. Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in '' Gödel, Escher, Bach'' but also present in several of his later books, is that it is "an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain". In ''Gödel, Escher, Bach'' he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a " strange loop", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound * Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

and

video feedback Video feedback is the process that starts and continues when a video camera is pointed at its own playback video monitor. The loop delay from camera to display back to camera is at least one video frame time, due to the input and output scanni ...

that Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The prototypical example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Hofstadter's 2007 book ''

'' carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to one. '' Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language'' is a long book devoted to language and translation, especially poetry translation, and one of its leitmotifs is a set of 88 translations of "Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by 16th-century French poet

Clément Marot Clément Marot (23 November 1496 – 12 September 1544) was a French Renaissance poet. Biography Youth Marot was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of 1496–1497. His father, Jean Marot (c.& ...

. In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as " pilingual" (meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all the languages that he has studied comes to 3.14159 ...), as well as an "oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages). In 1999, the bicentennial year of the Russian poet and writer

Alexander Pushkin Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (; rus, links=no, Александр Сергеевич ПушкинIn pre-Revolutionary script, his name was written ., r=Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsandr sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ ˈpuʂkʲɪn, ...

, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse ''

Eugene Onegin ''Eugene Onegin, A Novel in Verse'' (Reforms of Russian orthography, pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform rus, Евгений Оне́гин, ромáн в стихáх, p=jɪvˈɡʲenʲɪj ɐˈnʲeɡʲɪn, r=Yevgeniy Onegin, roman v stikhakh) is ...

''. He has translated other poems and two novels: ''

La Chamade ''La Chamade'' is a 1965 novel by French playwright and novelist Françoise Sagan. It was adapted into a 1968 movie starring Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli (27 December 1925 – 12 May 2020) was a French ac ...

'' (''That Mad Ache'') by

Françoise Sagan Françoise Sagan (born Françoise Delphine Quoirez; 21 June 1935 – 24 September 2004) was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois chara ...

, and ''La Scoperta dell'Alba'' (''The Discovery of Dawn'') by

Walter Veltroni Walter Veltroni (; born 3 July 1955) is an Italian writer, film director, journalist, and politician, who served as the first leader of the Democratic Party within the centre-left opposition, until his resignation on 17 February 2009. He serv ...

, the then-head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. ''The Discovery of Dawn'' was published in 2007, and ''That Mad Ache'' was published in 2009, bound together with Hofstadter's essay ''Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation''.

Hofstadter's Law

Hofstadter's Law Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complet ...

is "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." The law is stated in ''Gödel, Escher, Bach''.

Students

Hofstadter's former Ph.D. students include (with dissertation title): *

David Chalmers David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York Univers ...

Toward a Theory of Consciousness * Bob FrenchTabletop: An Emergent, Stochastic Model of Analogy-Making *

Copycat: A Computer Model of High-Level Perception and Conceptual Slippage in Analogy-making

Public image

Hofstadter has said that he feels "uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers". He admits that "a large fraction

f his audience F, or f, is the sixth Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is English alphabet#Let ...

seems to be those who are fascinated by technology", but when it was suggested that his work "has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence" he replied that he was pleased about that, but that he himself has "no interest in computers".The Mind Reader
, ''New York Times Magazine'', April 1, 2007 In that interview he also mentioned a course he has twice given at Indiana University, in which he took a "skeptical look at a number of highly touted AI projects and overall approaches". For example, upon the defeat of

Garry Kasparov Garry Kimovich Kasparov (born 13 April 1963) is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist and commentator. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by ...

Deep Blue Deep Blue may refer to: Film * ''Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads'', a 1992 documentary film about Mississippi Delta blues music * Deep Blue (2001 film), ''Deep Blue'' (2001 film), a film by Dwight H. Little * Deep Blue (2003 ...

, he commented that "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent". In his book ''Metamagical Themas'', he says that "in this day and age, how can anyone fascinated by creativity and beauty fail to see in computers the ultimate tool for exploring their essence?". Provoked by predictions of a

technological singularity The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the m ...

(a hypothetical moment in the future of humanity when a self-reinforcing, runaway development of

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

causes a radical change in technology and culture), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic. At Indiana University in 1999 he organized such a symposium, and in April 2000, he organized a larger symposium titled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University, in which he moderated a panel consisting of

Ray Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and e ...

Hans Moravec Hans Peter Moravec (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria) is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on ...

, Kevin Kelly,

Ralph Merkle Ralph C. Merkle (born February 2, 1952) is a computer scientist and mathematician. He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics. Contribution ...

Bill Joy William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at ...

Frank Drake Frank Donald Drake (May 28, 1930 – September 2, 2022) was an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist. He began his career as a radio astronomer, studying the planets of the Solar System and later pulsars. Drake expanded his interests ...

, John Holland and

John Koza John R. Koza is a computer scientist and a former adjunct professor at Stanford University, most notable for his work in pioneering the use of genetic programming for the optimization of complex problems. Koza co-founded Scientific Games Corporati ...

. Hofstadter was also an invited panelist at the first

Singularity Summit The Singularity Summit was the annual conference of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. It was started in 2006 at Stanford University by Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Peter Thiel, and the subsequent summits in 2007, 2008, 2009, 20 ...

, held at Stanford in May 2006. Hofstadter expressed doubt that the singularity will occur in the foreseeable future."Moore's Law, Artificial Evolution, and the Fate of Humanity." In L. Booker, S. Forrest, et al. (eds.), ''Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. In 1988 Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas, ''

Victim of the Brain ''Victim of the Brain'' is a 1988 film by Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos, loosely based on '' The Mind's I'' (1981), a compilation of texts and stories on the philosophy of mind and self, co-edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. ...

'', based on ''

The Mind's I ''The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul'' is a 1981 collection of essays and other texts about the nature of the mind and the self, edited with commentary by philosophers Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. The te ...

''. It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work.

Columnist

When

Martin Gardner Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writings of Lewis ...

retired from writing his "

Mathematical Games A mathematical game is a game whose rules, strategies, and outcomes are defined by clear mathematical parameters. Often, such games have simple rules and match procedures, such as Tic-tac-toe and Dots and Boxes. Generally, mathematical games ne ...

" column for ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...

'' magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981–83 with a column titled ''

Metamagical Themas ''Metamagical Themas'' is an eclectic collection of articles that Douglas Hofstadter wrote for the popular science magazine ''Scientific American'' during the early 1980s. The anthology was published in 1985 by Basic Books. The volume is subst ...

'' (an

anagram An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word ''anagram'' itself can be rearranged into ''nag a ram'', also the word ...

of "Mathematical Games"). An idea he introduced in one of these columns was the concept of "Reviews of This Book", a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself that has an online implementation. One of Hofstadter's columns in ''Scientific American'' concerned the damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book ''

'' are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire,
A Person Paper on Purity in Language
(1985), in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion at sexism and sexist language; Hofstadter published it under the pseudonym William Satire, an allusion to

William Safire William Lewis Safire (; Safir; December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009Safire, William (1986). ''Take My Word for It: More on Language.'' Times Books. . p. 185.) was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He w ...

. Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor

Robert Axelrod Robert Marshall Axelrod (born May 27, 1943) is an American political scientist. He is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he has been since 1974. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work o ...

in his computer tournament pitting many iterated

prisoner's dilemma The Prisoner's Dilemma is an example of a game analyzed in game theory. It is also a thought experiment that challenges two completely rational agents to a dilemma: cooperate with their partner for mutual reward, or betray their partner ("defe ...

strategies against each other, and a follow-up column discussed a similar tournament that Hofstadter and his graduate student Marek Lugowski organized. The "Metamagical Themas" columns ranged over many themes, including patterns in

Frédéric Chopin Frédéric François Chopin (born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin; 1 March 181017 October 1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leadin ...

's piano music (particularly his études), the concept of

superrationality In economics and game theory, a participant is considered to have superrationality (or renormalized rationality) if they have perfect rationality (and thus maximize their utility) but assume that all other players are superrational too and that a s ...

(choosing to cooperate when the other party/adversary is assumed to be equally intelligent as oneself), and the self-modifying game of

Nomic Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber, the of which include mechanisms for changing those rules, usually beginning by way of democratic voting. The game demonstrates that in any system where rule changes are possible, a si ...

, based on the way the legal system modifies itself, and developed by philosopher

Peter Suber Peter Dain Suber (born November 8, 1951) is a philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarl ...

Personal life

Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann Brush until her death. They met in Bloomington, and married in Ann Arbor in 1985. They had two children, Danny and Monica. Carol died in 1993 from the sudden onset of a brain tumor,

glioblastoma multiforme Glioblastoma, previously known as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is one of the most aggressive types of cancer that begin within the brain. Initially, signs and symptoms of glioblastoma are nonspecific. They may include headaches, personality ch ...

, when their children were 5 and 2. The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound Indiana University students was established in 1996 in her name. Hofstadter's book ''

Le Ton beau de Marot ''Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language'' is a 1997 book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings and beauty of translation. The book is a long and detailed examination of one short translati ...

'' is dedicated to their two children and its dedication reads "To M. & D., living sparks of their Mommy's soul". In 2010, Hofstadter met Baofen Lin in a

cha-cha-cha Cha cha cha may refer to: * ''Cha-cha-chá'' (music), a style of Cuban dance music * Cha-cha-cha (dance), a Latin American dance accompanying the music Film and television * ''Cha Cha Cha'' (film), a 2013 Italian crime film * ''Cha Cha Cha'' ...

class, and they married in Bloomington in September 2012. Hofstadter has composed pieces for piano and for piano and voice. He created an audio CD, ''DRH/JJ'', which includes all these compositions performed mostly by pianist Jane Jackson, with a few performed by Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur and Hofstadter. The dedication for ''I Am A Strange Loop'' is: "To my sister Laura, who can understand, and to our sister Molly, who cannot." Hofstadter explains in the preface that his younger sister Molly never developed the ability to speak or understand language. As a consequence of his attitudes about consciousness and empathy, Hofstadter became

vegan Veganism is the practice of abstaining from the use of animal product—particularly in diet—and an associated philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals. An individual who follows the diet or philosophy is known as a vegan. Di ...

in his teenage years, and has remained primarily a

vegetarian Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, insects, and the flesh of any other animal). It may also include abstaining from eating all by-products of animal slaughter. Vegetarianism m ...

since that time.

In popular culture

In the 1982 novel '' 2010: Odyssey Two'', Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to '' 2001: A Space Odyssey'',

HAL 9000 HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's ''Space Odyssey'' series. First appearing in the 1968 film '' 2001: A Space Odyssey'', HAL ( Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) ...

is described by the character "Dr. Chandra" as being caught in a "Hofstadter– Möbius loop". The movie uses the term "H. Möbius loop". On April 3, 1995, Hofstadter's book '' Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought'' was the first book sold by

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

Published works

Books

The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available): *'' Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'' () (1979) *''

'' () (collection of ''Scientific American'' columns and other essays, all with postscripts) *''Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creatività'' () (in Italian only) *''

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies ''Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought'' is a 1995 book by Douglas Hofstadter and other members of the Fluid Analogies Research Group exploring the mechanisms of intelligence through compu ...

'' (co-authored with several of Hofstadter's graduate students) () *''Rhapsody on a Theme by Clement Marot'' () (1995, published 1996; volume 16 of series ''The Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values'') *''

: In Praise of the Music of Language'' () *''

'' () (2007) *
Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
', co-authored with Emmanuel Sander () (first published in French as ''L'Analogie. Cœur de la pensée''; published in English in the U.S. in April 2013)

Papers

Hofstadter has written, among many others, the following papers: *"Energy levels and wave functions of

s in rational and irrational magnetic fields"
''Phys. Rev. B'' 14 (1976) 2239
*"A non-deterministic approach to analogy, involving the Ising model of ferromagnetism", in

Eduardo Caianiello Eduardo Renato Caianiello (June 25, 1921 – October 22, 1993) was an Italian physicist. He contributed to scientific research, especially in quantum theory and cybernetics. He was also a pioneer in the theory of neural networks. His Caianiello's ...

(ed.), ''The Physics of Cognitive Processes''. Teaneck, NJ: World Scientific, 1987.
"To Err is Human; To Study Error-making is Cognitive Science"
(co-authored by

David J. Moser David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...

), Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1989, pp. 185–215. *"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'' Vol. 4, No. 2 (1995) pp. 109–121.

in

Dedre Gentner Dedre Dariel Gentner (born 1944) is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. She is a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning. Wor ...

Keith Holyoak Keith James Holyoak (born January 16, 1950) is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking. His work showed ho ...

, and

Boicho Kokinov Boicho Kokinov ( bg, Бойчо Кокинов, 27 December 1960 – 10 May 2013) was an associate professor in cognitive science and computer science at the New Bulgarian University New Bulgarian University ( bg, Нов български уни ...

(eds.) ''The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science'', Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/

Bradford Book The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...

, 2001, pp. 499–538. Hofstadter has also written over 50 papers that were published through the

Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition Center or centre may refer to: Mathematics *Center (geometry), the middle of an object * Center (algebra), used in various contexts ** Center (group theory) ** Center (ring theory) * Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentricity ...

. CRCC Publications offline

Involvement in other books

Hofstadter has written forewords for or edited the following books: *''

: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul'' (co-edited with

Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...

), 1981. (, ) and () *'' Alan Turing: The Enigma'' by

Andrew Hodges Andrew Philip Hodges (; born 1949) is a British mathematician, author and emeritus senior research fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. Education Hodges was born in London in 1949 and educated at Birkbeck, University of London where he was award ...

, 1983. (Preface) *''

Sparse Distributed Memory Sparse distributed memory (SDM) is a mathematical model of human long-term memory introduced by Pentti Kanerva in 1988 while he was at NASA Ames Research Center. It is a generalized random-access memory (RAM) for long (e.g., 1,000 bit) binary words. ...

'' by

Pentti Kanerva Pentti Kanerva is a research affiliate at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, and is the originator of the sparse distributed memory model.Kanerva, Pentti. Sparse distributed memory. MIT press, 1988. He is responsible for relating the properties of ...

, Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1988. (Foreword) () *''Are Quanta Real? A Galilean Dialogue'' by J.M. Jauch, Indiana University Press, 1989. (Foreword) () *''Gödel's Proof'' (2002 revised edition) by

Ernest Nagel Ernest Nagel (November 16, 1901 – September 20, 1985) was an American philosopher of science. Suppes, Patrick (1999)Biographical memoir of Ernest Nagel In '' American National Biograph''y (Vol. 16, pp. 216-218). New York: Oxford University Pr ...

and James R. Newman, edited by Hofstadter. In the foreword, Hofstadter explains that the book (originally published in 1958) exerted a profound influence on him when he was young. () *''Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History'' by Alice Rowe Burks, 2003. (Foreword) *''

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical com ...

: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker'' by

Christof Teuscher Christof Teuscher is an author and editor who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States. Teuscher obtained MSc and PhD degrees from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausan ...

, 2003. (editor) *''Brainstem Still Life'' by

Jason Salavon Jason Salavon (born 1970) is an American contemporary artist. He is noted for his use of custom computer software to manipulate and reconfigure preexisting media and data to create new visual works of fine art. Early life The son of an artist, ...

, 2004. (Introduction) () *''Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí & the Artists of Optical Illusion'' by

Al Seckel Alfred Paul "Al" Seckel (September 3, 1958 – 2015) was an American collector and popularizer of Optical illusion, visual and other types of sensory illusions, who wrote books about them. Active in the Freethought movement as a Skepticism ...

, 2004. (Foreword) *'' King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry'' by

Siobhan Roberts Siobhan Roberts is a Canadians, Canadian science journalist, biographer, and history of mathematics, historian of mathematics. Education Roberts was born in Belleville, Ontario. She earned a degree in history at Queen's University at Kingston ...

, Walker and Company, 2006. (Foreword) *''Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science'' by

Karl Sigmund Karl Sigmund (born July 26, 1945) is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Vienna and one of the pioneers of evolutionary game theory. Career Sigmund was schooled in the Lycée Francais de Vienne. From 1963 to 1968 he studied at the Ins ...

, Basic Books, 2017. Hofstadter wrote the foreword and helped with the translation.

Translations

*''

: A Novel Versification'' from the Russian original of

), 1999. () *''

The Discovery of Dawn ''The'' () is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite ...

'' from the Italian original of

, 2007. () *''

That Mad Ache ''That'' is an English language word used for several grammar, grammatical purposes. These include use as an adjective, conjunction (grammar), conjunction, pronoun, adverb, and intensifier; it has distance from the speaker, as opposed to words lik ...

'', co-bound with ''Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation'' from the French original of Francoise Sagan), 2009. ()

Notes

References

External links

Stanford University Presidential Lecture
– site dedicated to Hofstadter and his work *
"The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think"
by James Somers, ''

The Atlantic ''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, ...

'', November 2013 issue
Profile
at Resonance Publications

– bibliographic page with reviews of several of Hofstadter's books

– a short autobiography in the form of a

lipogram A lipogram (from grc, λειπογράμματος, ''leipográmmatos'', "leaving out a letter") is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is a ...

Github repo of sourcecode & literature of Hofstadter's students work

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hofstadter, Douglas 1945 births Living people 20th-century American writers 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American poets 21st-century American philosophers 21st-century translators American people of Polish-Jewish descent American science writers Mathematics popularizers American skeptics Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Indiana University faculty National Book Award winners Palo Alto High School alumni People from Palo Alto, California Philosophers of mind Jewish philosophers Jewish American writers Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners Recreational mathematicians Stanford University alumni Translators of Alexander Pushkin University of Michigan faculty University of Oregon alumni Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellows 21st-century American non-fiction writers International School of Geneva alumni People in vegetarianism