Douglas Hofstadter
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Hofstadter in Bologna, Italy, in 2002
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| Born |
Douglas Richard Hofstadter
February 15, 1945
New York City, United States
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| Nationality | American |
| Education | Stanford University (BSc) University of Oregon (PhD, 1974) |
| Known for | Gödel, Escher, Bach I Am a Strange Loop Hofstadter's butterfly Hofstadter's law |
| Spouse(s) | Carol Ann Brush (1985–1993; her death; 2 children) Baofen Lin (2012–present) |
| Awards | National Book Award Pulitzer Prize Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Cognitive science Philosophy of mind Translation Physics |
| Institutions | Indiana University Stanford University University of Oregon University of Michigan |
| Thesis | The Energy Levels of Bloch Electrons in a Magnetic Field (1974) |
| Doctoral advisor | Gregory Wannier |
| Doctoral students | David Chalmers Robert M. French Scott A. Jones Melanie Mitchell |
| Website | prelectur |
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
Early life and education
Hofstadter was born in New York City to Jewish parents: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter and Nancy Givan Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor, and attended the International School of Geneva in 1958–59. He graduated with Distinction in mathematics from Stanford University in 1965, and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975, where his study of the energy levels of Bloch electrons in a magnetic field led to his discovery of the fractal known as Hofstadter's butterfly.
Academic career
Since
1988, Hofstadter has been the College of Arts and Sciences
Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature
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 he called
"artificial intelligence research", a label 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.
He was also appointed adjunct professor of history and philosophy of
science, philosophy, comparative literature, and psychology, but has
said that his involvement with most of those departments is nominal. In 1988 Hofstadter received the In Praise of Reason award, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's highest honor. In April 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2010 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden.
Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics.
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Hofstadter giving a presentation at the 2006 Singularity Summit
At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he and Melanie Mitchell coauthored a computational model of "high-level perception"—Copycat—and several other models of analogy-making and cognition, including the Tabletop project, co-developed with Robert M. French. Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall subsequently extended the Copycat project under the name "Metacat".[21]
The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling,
aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform
"gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models
include 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, as well as George (Francisco
Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in
triangle geometry.
The pursuit of beauty has driven Hofstadter both inside and
outside his professional work. He seeks beautiful mathematical patterns,
beautiful explanations, beautiful typefaces, beautiful sonic patterns
in poetry, etc. Hofstadter has said of himself, "I'm someone who
has one foot in the world of humanities and arts, and the other foot in
the world of science." He has had several exhibitions of his artwork in
various university galleries. These shows have featured large
collections of his gridfonts, his ambigrams
(pieces of calligraphy created with two readings, either of which is
usually obtained from the other by rotating or reflecting the ambigram,
but sometimes simply by "oscillation", like the Necker Cube or the rabbit/duck figure of Joseph Jastrow),
and his "Whirly Art" (music-inspired visual patterns realized using
shapes based on various alphabets from India). Hofstadter invented the
term "ambigram" in 1984; many ambigrammists have since taken up the
concept.
Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely, but
not solely, speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and
analogies of all sorts, and his longtime 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 he and FARG members have developed.
All FARG computational models share certain key principles, including:
- 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
FARG models also have an overarching philosophy that all cognition is
built from the making of analogies. The computational architectures
that share these precepts are called "active symbols" architectures.
Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB)
but also present in several of his later books, is that it is an
emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain. In GEB
he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants
and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular,
Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from
the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback
that Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". The
prototypical example of a strange loop is the self-referential structure
at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop
carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the
idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather
than being limited to one.
Hofstadter's writing is characterized by an intense interaction between form and content, as exemplified by the 20 dialogues in GEB,
many of which simultaneously discuss and imitate strict musical forms
used by Bach, such as canons and fugues. Most of Hofstadter's books
feature some kind of structural alternation: in GEB between dialogues and chapters, in The Mind's I between selections and reflections, in Metamagical Themas
between Chapters and Postscripts, and so forth. In both his writing and
his teaching, Hofstadter stresses the concrete, constantly using
examples and analogies, and avoids the abstract. Typical of the courses
he teaches is his seminar "Group Theory and Galois Theory
Visualized", in which abstract mathematical ideas are rendered as
concretely as possible. He puts great effort into making ideas clear and
visual, and asserts that when he teaches, if his students do not
understand something, it is never their fault but always his own.
Hofstadter is passionate about languages. In addition to English,
his mother tongue, he speaks French and Italian fluently (the language
spoken at home with his children is Italian). At various times in his
life, he has studied (in descending order of level of fluency reached)
German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Mandarin, Dutch, Polish, and Hindi. His love of sounds pushes him to strive to minimize, and ideally get rid of, any foreign accent.
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language
is a long book devoted to language and translation, especially poetry
translation, and one of its leitmotifs is a set of 88 translations of
"Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by 16th-century French poet Clément Marot. In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as "pilingual"
(meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all
the languages that he's studied comes to 3.14159 ...), as well as an
"oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages).
In 1999, the bicentennial year of Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. He has translated many other poems too (always respecting their formal constraints), and two novels (in prose): La Chamade (That Mad Ache) by French writer Françoise Sagan, and La Scoperta dell'Alba (The Discovery of Dawn) by Walter Veltroni, the then head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. The Discovery of Dawn was published in 2007, and That Mad Ache was published in 2009, bound together with Hofstadter's essay Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation.
