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Douglas Hofstadter
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Douglas Hofstadter is a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, with connections to several departments including Computer Science and Psychology. A math major at Stanford, he did his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Oregon. He explored number theory using computers in the early 1960's, and fell in love with "experimental mathematics". He never studied geometry at all, but somehow fell in love with it purely on his own in 1992. His love affair with Euclidean and other geometries (including Euclidual, its dual with respect to the self-dual projective geometry), mediated in large part through Geometer's Sketchpad, has been most ardent. He is deeply involved with triangle centers and their complex interrelationships, and has taught several courses on geometry and discovery, called "Circles and Triangles: Diamonds of Geometry" (or "CaT:DoG"). He is working on a book on these topics.
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Douglas Hofstadter is College Professor of cognitive science and computer science, director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, and adjunct professor of philosophy, psychology, history and philosophy of science, and comparative literature. His books include: Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern; and Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, for which he received the Pulitzer prize. He wrote a column for Scientific American for a number of years. His research is driven by a long-standing interest in creativity and consciousness. More information on Professor Hofstadter can be found at:
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Douglas Hofstadter and his research group, FARG, have a particular approach to modelling human thought processes, and this book collects together some of their work over the last two decades. They believe that perception is a key part of cognition, that analogy is a key component of perception, and that AI cognition research programmes that start from pre-perceived data input are missing the point: much of the hard work has already been done by the (human) pre-processors.
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When he was 27, Douglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, a bestselling book loved by precocious teenagers and computer hackers. Its mixture of logic, music and visual art blended the richness of the humanities and the rigor of the sciences in an altogether unforgettable confection that won a Pulitzer Prize. But GEB, as it is affectionately known, was widely misunderstood. Now, at age 62, Hofstadter tries to get his message across more forcefully. Using invented dialogues, fanciful metaphors, mathematical analogies and light-hearted stories, he limns again and again his central point: The self is an illusion or, as he says, "a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination." While this may seem a depressing or, at least, odd conclusion (If the self is unreal, then who is reading this?), it's not.
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An exhibition of drawings by Douglas Hofstadter, For the Love of Line and Pattern: Studies Inspired by Alphabets and Music, will open at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 30, in Cooper Union's Great Hall Gallery. That evening at 6:30 in the college's Great Hall, Hofstadter will give a lecture about his sketches, inspired by calligraphic and sonic forms of art. His talk is sponsored by the Gerald Philips Lecture Series and the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography.
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Douglas Hofstadter's new book is called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. While the first two books, Goedel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas discussed a number of ideas relevant to artificial intelligence and cognitive science, such as recursivity and emergent behavior, the new book looks back from the perspective of having grappled with those ideas in the course of implementing actual computer models. Programs that model creativity and analogy-making have been designed by Doug and his graduate students, and the story of their past, present and future development is the subject of the book, co-authored by the students in the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG). See the table of contents.
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Douglas Hofstadter