Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Followers (2,321)

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Born

in New York City, New York, The United States

February 15, 1945

Website

https://luddy.indiana.edu/contact/profile/?Doug...

Genre

Nonfiction, Science, Philosophy

edit data

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Douglas attended the International School of Geneva for a year. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physic Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.

Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. Douglas grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Douglas attended the International School of Geneva for a year. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.

Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal.

In April, 2009, Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him.

At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively.

Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members.

All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. F ...more

Combine Editions
Douglas R. Hofstadter’s books

Average rating: 4.17 · 90,081 ratings · 5,320 reviews · 22 distinct works • Similar authors

	Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid 4.29 avg rating — 52,191 ratings — published 1979 — 80 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	I Am a Strange Loop 3.95 avg rating — 8,591 ratings — published 2007 — 39 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul by Douglas R. Hofstadter (editor), Daniel C. Dennett (editor) 4.15 avg rating — 5,952 ratings — published 1981 — 43 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern 4.20 avg rating — 3,672 ratings — published 1985 — 22 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking 3.84 avg rating — 1,084 ratings — published 2011 — 31 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language 4.24 avg rating — 831 ratings — published 1995 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies 3.99 avg rating — 611 ratings — published 1991 — 12 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Tumult of Inner Voices or What Is the Meaning of the Word "I" 4.03 avg rating — 29 ratings — published 1982	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ambigrammi: Un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creatività by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Fulvio Salvatori (Translator) really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 14 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	GODEL ESCHER BACH 3.33 avg rating — 3 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Douglas R. Hofstadter…

Quotes by Douglas R. Hofstadter (?)

“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

tags: chaos, order, science

189 likes

“Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”
― Douglas Hofstadter

tags: productivity

128 likes

“Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

104 likes

See all Douglas R. Hofstadter's quotes »

Polls

GdL saggistica bimestre settembre-ottobre 2016. Scegli il saggio che vuoi leggere e commentare nel GdL.

Come funzionano i romanzi. Breve storia delle tecniche narrative per lettori e scrittori di James Wood

35 votes, 26.1%

Gödel, Escher, Bach: un'Eterna Ghirlanda Brillante di Douglas R. Hofstadter

20 votes, 14.9%

Passato prossimo: donne romane da Tacita a Sulpicia di Eva Cantarella

17 votes, 12.7%

Il cucchiaino scomparso e altre storie della tavola periodica degli elementi di Sam Kean

14 votes, 10.4%

La cultura greca e le origini del pensiero europeo di Bruno Snell

11 votes, 8.2%

Viaggi di Michael Crichton

10 votes, 7.5%

Chiedilo al Dr. Ozzy di Ozzy Osbourne

9 votes, 6.7%

Dell'amore e del dolore delle donne di Umberto Veronesi

8 votes, 6.0%

Gli spettri del Congo di Adam Hochschild

7 votes, 5.2%

La grande trasformazione di Karl Polanyi

3 votes, 2.2%

134 total votes

11 comments

More...

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
Pick-a-Shelf: 2011-02 - Science - Post February Reviews Here	56	60	Feb 28, 2011 08:55PM
Nobel Prize Winners: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter	44	79	Aug 19, 2012 08:18AM
The Sword and Laser: What obscure books do you love?	143	641	Aug 22, 2012 12:57AM
The Sword and Laser: What Are You Reading? - August 2012	244	578	Sep 03, 2012 02:36AM
The Life of a Boo...: Rachel Renee's 2012 Book Challenge	11	55	Sep 13, 2012 08:15AM
Nobel Prize Winners: The Tin Drum	33	35	Sep 30, 2012 05:27PM
Science and Inquiry: August 2012 - How the Mind Works	152	214	Nov 23, 2012 10:38PM
The Seasonal Read...: Fall Challenge 2012: Completed Tasks - DO NOT DELETE ANY POSTS IN THIS TOPIC	2291	756	Dec 28, 2012 03:29PM

More…

Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Douglas to Goodreads.