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Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic. He is probably best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (abbreviated as GEB) which was published in 1979, and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. This book is commonly considered to have inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence, and attracted substantial notice outside its central artificial intelligence readership owing to its drawing on themes from such diverse disciplines as high-energy physics, music, the visual arts, molecular biology, and literature.
Biography The son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, he graduated in Mathematics at Stanford University in 1965 and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. As of 2005, he is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. Hofstadter is multilingual; he spent a few years in Sweden in the mid-1960s where he learned Swedish. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he speaks Italian, French, and German; his knowledge of these languages can be partly attributed to having spent a year of his youth in Geneva, where he attended the International School of Geneva. He also speaks some Russian: he translated parts of GEB into Russian, and published a verse translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. In Le Ton beau de Marot (written in memory of his late wife Carol) he describes himself as a "pilingual" (conversant in 3.14159... languages) and an "oligoglot" (speaker of few languages). His interests include music, themes of the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation, and mathematical games. Work At Indiana University he co-authored with Melanie Mitchell and others, a cognitive model of "high-level perception", Copycat, and several other models of analogy making and cognition. The Copycat project has since grown into Metacat and Magnificat and has been worked on by Hofstadter and several assistants. A 1999 overview of Metacat can be found here (PDF). Other new models based on the Copycat 'FARGitecture' include SeekWell and SeqSee, which model cognition and analogy in musical and number sequence domains respectively. Hofstadter has not published much in conventional academic journals (except during his early physics career, see below), 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. When Martin Gardner retired from writing his Mathematical Games column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him with a column entitled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). Hofstadter also invented the concept of Reviews of This Book, a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself (the idea was introduced in Metamagical Themas): Apparently, Idries Shah has attempted this, or at least something similar, with The Book of the Book (ISBN 0-900860-12-X). Books The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available): Papers Hofstadter wrote, among many others, the following papers: Involvement in other books Hofstadter wrote forewords for or edited the following books: Miscellaneous Students Some of Hofstadter's former students have also become famous: Hofstadters Law In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter states the oft-cited Hofstadter's Law, a self-referencing adage, which reads as follows: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Trivia See also | ||||||||
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