Douglas Richard Hofstadter (b.1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist and comparative literature academic. His scholarship spans the sense of the self in relation to the external world, perception, analogy-thinking, artistic formation, literary translation, and invention in mathematics and physics.
Born in New York City, Hofstadter received his B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University (1965) and his M.S. and PhD in physics from the University of Oregon (1972, 1975.) Since 1988, he has been a cognitive science professor and comparative literature at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. It has had a considerable impact on people in many disciplines, ranging from philosophy to mathematics to artificial intelligence, music, and beyond. He has penned four other books and numerous articles. His columns for Scientific American was collected as Metamagical Themas (1985.)
Hofstadter’s later works have included the poetry translation Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (1997) and I Am a Strange Loop (2007; winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
—Douglas R. Hofstadter
No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over … the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.
—Douglas R. Hofstadter
Topics: Zen
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.
—Douglas R. Hofstadter
Topics: Language, Audiences
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