Douglas Hofstadter

Information about Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Born:January 15 1945 (1945--) (age 62)
New York, New York
Occupation:Professor of cognitive science
Nationality:United States
Writing period:1979-Present
Subjects:Cognitive science, mathematics, translation


Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic. He is 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.

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. 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. [1]

Hofstadter is multilingual. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he also speaks Italian and French fluently. He spent several months in Sweden in the mid-1960s, where he learned some Swedish, and has also studied Spanish, German, Dutch, Mandarin, and Polish[2]. He also speaks a "smattering" of Russian[3], and has published a verse translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. In Le Ton beau de Marot (written in memory of his late wife Carol) he jokingly describes himself as "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. Hofstadter is also a vegetarian.[4]

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. An overview of Metacat can be found here. Other new models based on the Copycat 'FARGitecture' include Musicat and SeqSee, which model cognition and analogy in musical and number sequence domains respectively.

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):

[It] is just a fantasy of mine. I would love to see a book consisting of nothing but a collection of reviews of it that appeared (after its publication, of course) in major newspapers and magazines. It sounds paradoxical, but it could be arranged with a lot of planning and hard work. First, a group of major journals would all have to agree to run reviews of the book by the various contributors to the book. Then all the reviewers would begin writing. But they would have to mail off their various drafts to all the other reviewers very regularly so that all the reviews could evolve together, and thus eventually reach a stable state of a kind known in physics as a "Hartree-Fock self-consistent solution". Then the book could be published, after which its reviews would come out in their respective journals, as per arrangement.

– Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas



Hofstadter has said that he feels "uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers."<ref name="wired" /> He admits that "a large fraction [of his audience] seems to be those who are fascinated by technology,"<ref name="wired" /> but when it was suggested that his work "has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence" he replied that he has "no interest in computers."[5] In that interview he pointed to a seminar, AI: Hope and Hype, where he took a "skeptical look at a number of highly-touted AI projects and overall approaches". For example, upon the defeat of Kasparov by Deep Blue, he commented that "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent." [1]

In 1988 Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas entitled "Victim of the Brain" [2].

Published works

Books

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

Papers

Hofstadter wrote, among many others, the following papers:
  • "Energy levels and wave functions of Bloch electrons in rational and irrational magnetic fields", Phys. Rev. B 14 (1976) 2239.
  • Written while he was at the University of Oregon, this paper was enormously influential in directing further research. Hofstadter predicted that the allowed energy level values of an electron in this crystal lattice, as a function of a magnetic field applied to the system, formed a fractal set. That is, the distribution of energy levels for large scale changes in the applied magnetic field repeat patterns seen in the small scale structure. This fractal structure is generally known as "Hofstadter's butterfly", and has recently been confirmed in transport measurements in two-dimensional electron systems with a superimposed nano-fabricated lattice.
  • "A non-deterministic approach to analogy, involving the Ising model of ferromagnetism", in E. Caianiello (ed.), The Physics of Cognitive Processes. Teaneck, NJ: World Scientific, 1987.
  • "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 4,2 (1995) pp. 109-121.
  • "Analogy as the Core of Cognition", in Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov (eds.) The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Book, 2001, pp. 499-538.
  • Hofstadter also wrote over 50 papers that were published through the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition; see http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/phard.html.

Involvement in other books

Hofstadter wrote forewords for or edited the following books:
  • The Mind's I (co-edited with Daniel Dennett) (ISBN 0-465-03091-2 and ISBN 0-553-01412-9)
  • by Andrew Hodges. (Preface)
  • Gödel's Proof (2002 revised edition) by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, edited by Hofstadter (ISBN 0-8147-5816-9). Hofstadter claimed the book (originally published in 1958) was highly influential to his thinking during his early years.
  • Who invented the computer? The legal battle that changed computing history. (2003) by Alice Rowe Burks.
  • by Christof Teuscher (Editor)
  • Jason Salavon: Brainstem Still Life (ISBN 981-05-1662-2) 2004 (Introduction)
  • 2004 by Al Seckel. Hofstadter wrote the foreword.
  • King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry by Siobhan Roberts, Walker and Company, 2006. Hofstadter wrote the foreword.

Miscellaneous

  • The film Victim of the Brain was based on The Mind's I (see above).
  • He published an audio CD with piano music composed by himself and performed by Jane Jackson, Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur and himself.

Students

Some of Hofstadter's former students have also become famous:

Hofstadter's Law

Main article: Hofstadter's 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

  • In , Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to , HAL 9000 is caught in a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop". This is most likely a reference to Hofstadter.
  • Hofstadter is related by marriage to the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould: Hofstadter's paternal aunt was married to Gould's maternal uncle.
  • Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book sold by Amazon.com. [6]
  • In Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves Karen Green interviews Hofstadter regarding his opinions about The Navidson Record. The "compiler" of the book, Johnny, claims to have contacted Hofstadter "who made it very clear he'd never heard of Will Navidson, Karen Green or the house...".
  • In the 2007-04-01 New York Times Magazine, Hofstadter says of his Wikipedia entry: "I have no interest in computers. The entry is filled with inaccuracies, and it kind of depresses me."<ref name="NYTimes" />

See also

Notes

1. ^ [3]
2. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot. New York: Basic Books, 1997, pp. 16-17.
3. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 627
4. ^ Wired interview
5. ^ New York Times Magazine, 2007-04-01
6. ^ Amazon.com's company timeline

External links

Persondata
NAMEHofstadter, Douglas Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMESHofstadter, Douglas
SHORT DESCRIPTIONAmerican academic and author
DATE OF BIRTHJanuary 15 1945 (1945--) (age 62)
PLACE OF BIRTHNew York City, New York
DATE OF DEATH
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Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Author Douglas Hofstadter
Country USA
Language English
Subject(s) Consciousness, intelligence
Publisher Basic Books
Publication date 1979
Pages 777 pages
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Pulitzer Prize

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First awarded 1917
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Robert Hofstadter (February 5, 1915 – November 17, 1990) was the winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure of the nucleons.
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Mathematics (colloquially, maths or math) is the body of knowledge centered on such concepts as quantity, structure, space, and change, and also the academic discipline that studies them. Benjamin Peirce called it "the science that draws necessary conclusions".
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