Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is probably best known for his 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning book GÃÂÃÂ¶del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

Hofstadter received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. He is currently (2004) a professor of cognitive science and computer science (among others) at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is the son of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter.

Douglas is multilingual, having spent his youth in Geneva. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s and understands Swedish. He speaks Italian, English, French, German and some Russian. In Le Ton beau de Marot he describes himself as a pilingual and an oligoglot (speaker of few languages).

His interests include themes of the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation, and mathematical games.

Author of (ISBN's refer to paperback editions):

GÃÂÃÂ¶del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (ISBN 0465026567)
The Mind's I (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0465030912)
Metamagical Themas (ISBN 0465045669)
Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creativita (in Italian only)
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (ISBN 0465024750)
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (ISBN 0465086454)
A verse translation of Eugene Onegin by Aleksandr Pushkin (ISBN 0465020941)

He also revised "Goedel's Proof", a book by Ernest Nagel and James Newman. Hofstadter claimed the book was highly influential to his thinking during his early years.

Table of contents

1 Quote
2 See also
3 External links

Quote

"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."