Douglas Hofstadter

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Douglas Hofstadter bigraphy, stories - American academic and author

Douglas Hofstadter : biography

February 15, 1945 –

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on the sense of "I", consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Past winners and finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-17., New York Times and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science.. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-07.GEB won the 1980 award for hardcover science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

Columnist

When Martin Gardner retired from writing his "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981–1983 with a column entitled Metamagical Themas (an anagram 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 which 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 Metamagical Themas are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire entitled "A Person Paper on Purity in Language", 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. by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter), 1985 – a satirical piece, on the subject of sexist language Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor Robert Axelrod in his computer tournament pitting many iterated prisoner’s dilemma 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, and included, to name just three, one on patterns in Frederic Chopin’s piano music (particularly the études), another on the concept of superrationality (choosing to cooperate when the other party/adversary is assumed to be equally intelligent as oneself), and one on the self-modifying game of Nomic, based on the way in which the legal system modifies itself, and developed by philosopher Peter Suber.Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books, New Yoork (1985), see preface, introduction, contents listing.

In popular culture

In the 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke’s first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is described by Dr. Chandra as being caught in a "Hofstadter–Möbius loop". The movie uses the term "H. Möbius loop".

In 1995, Hofstadter’s book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book ever sold by Amazon.com.Amazon.com’s July 1995

Notes

Published works

Books

The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available):

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0-465-02656-7) (1979)
  • Metamagical Themas (ISBN 0-465-04566-9) (collection of Scientific American columns and other essays, all with postscripts)
  • Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creatività (ISBN 88-7757-006-7) (in Italian only)
  • Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (ISBN 0-465-02475-0)
  • Rhapsody on a Theme by Clement Marot (ISBN 0-910-15311-6) (1995, published 1996; volume 16 of series The Grace A. Tanner Lecture in Human Values)
  • Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0-465-08645-4)
  • Eugene Onegin: A Novel Versification (ISBN 0-465-02094-1)
  • I Am a Strange Loop (ISBN 0-465-03078-5) (2007)
  • The Discovery of Dawn (ISBN 9780847831098) (2007) (a translation of a novel by Walter Veltroni)
  • That Mad Ache, co-bound with Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation (ISBN 9780465010981) (2009)
  • Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, co-authored with Emmanuel Sander (ISBN 0465018475) (first published in French as L’Analogie. Cœur de la pensée; published in English in the US in April 2013)