Douglas Hofstadter

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar in cognitive science and computer science. His work explores the self’s relationship to the outside world, consciousness, how we make analogies, strange loops, ambigrams, artificial intelligence, and the process of discovery in math and physics. His 1979 book *Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid* earned both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the National Book Award for Science. His later book *I Am a Strange Loop* (2007) received the *Los Angeles Times* Book Prize for Science and Technology. Hofstadter was born in New York City to Nancy Givan Hofstadter and Robert Hofstadter, a future Nobel Prize-winning physicist. He spent his childhood on the Stanford University campus, where his father taught, and attended the International School of Geneva from 1958 to 1959. He graduated with distinction in mathematics from Stanford in 1965 and began graduate work in the same field, but dropped out after what he described as a “hugely bitter blow to my ego,” feeling unable to keep up. He later earned a PhD in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975, calling the experience “traumatic.” His doctoral research on the energy levels of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field led him to discover the fractal now called Hofstadter’s butterfly. In 1977, Hofstadter joined the computer science faculty at Indiana University, where he started a research program in computer modeling of mental processes—initially calling it “artificial intelligence research,” a label he later replaced with “cognitive science research.” He moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1984 as a professor of psychology and holder of the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. He returned to Indiana University in 1988 as a College of Arts and Sciences Professor in cognitive science and computer science, also holding adjunct appointments in history and philosophy of science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology—though he noted his involvement with most of those departments is nominal. Since 1988, he has served as the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, directing the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. That center consists of himself and his graduate students, known as the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG). In 1988, he received the In Praise of Reason award, the highest honor of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2009, and a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden, in 2010. At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell co-developed a computational model of “high-level perception” called Copycat, along with other models of analogy-making and cognition, such as the Tabletop project with Robert M. French. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform gridfonts. More recent models include Phaeaco (by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (by Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively, as well as George (by Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models perception and discovery in triangle geometry. Hofstadter’s view of consciousness, first laid out in *Gödel, Escher, Bach* and expanded in later books, is that it is “an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain.” In that book, he compares the social organization of an ant colony to the mind as a coherent “colony” of neurons. He argues that our sense of having or being an “I” arises from an abstract pattern he calls a “strange loop,” which he defines as “a level-crossing feedback loop.” The classic example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure at the heart of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. His 2007 book *I Am a Strange Loop* develops this idea further, suggesting that each human “I” is distributed across many brains, not confined to a single one. In 1999, the bicentennial of Alexander Pushkin’s birth, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse *Eugene Onegin*. He has also translated other poems and two novels: Françoise Sagan’s *La Chamade* (published as *That Mad Ache*) and Walter Veltroni’s *La Scoperta dell’Alba* (published as *The Discovery of Dawn*). *The Discovery of Dawn* came out in 2007, and *That Mad Ache* in 2009, bound with Hofstadter’s essay “Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation.” His book *Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language* is a lengthy work on language and translation, especially poetry translation, centered on 88 translations of Clément Marot’s highly constrained 16th-century poem “Ma Mignonne.” In that book, Hofstadter jokingly calls himself “pilingual” (meaning his total mastery of all languages he has studied sums to 3.14159…) and an “oligoglot” (someone who speaks “a few” languages).