College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature
CRCC, 510 N. Fess Ave., Bloomington, Indiana 47408-3822 U.S.A
(812) 855-6965
dughof@indiana.edu

B.S. in Mathematics, with distinction, Stanford University, 1965
M.S. in Physics, University of Oregon, 1972
Ph.D. in Physics, University of Oregon, 1975

• Thesis advisor: Gregory H. Wannier
• Thesis area: Theoretical solid-state physics
• Thesis title: “The Energy Levels and Wave Functions of Bloch Electrons In a Homogeneous Magnetic Field”

• Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction category), 1980
• American Book Award (Science Hardback category), 1980 for Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
• Guggenheim Fellow, 1980-81

Douglas Hofstadter is College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University, where he also directs the Fluid Analogies Research Group, nicknamed “FARG”, at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. For roughly 25 years, the FARGonauts have been making computational models of our human concepts and categories, the premise being that if and when these mini-concepts achieve the holy grail of “fluidity”, creative analogy-making will be an outcome. Progress has been made, but there is still far to go (see Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies).

Hofstadter’s interests concerning the human mind are varied, ranging from errors as a window on the mind (see “To Err is Human; To Study Error-making is Cognitive Science”) to the mechanisms of creativity to the nature of consciousness (see I Am a Strange Loop and The Mind’s I). Currently his most active goal is to reveal how analogy-making lies at the base of all human thought (see “Analogy as the Core of Cognition” and hopefully, in a couple of years, Toward the Roots of Thought).

Hofstadter has a lifelong love for languages, and has written a tome about translation, analogies, constraints, and creativity (Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language), plus translated many poems and two novels into English – one novel in verse (Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin) and one in prose (Françoise Sagan’s La Chamade, anagrammatically titled in English That Mad Ache). He has also spent much time doing art and music (see Ambigrammi).

From 1981 to 1983, taking over from Martin Gardner’s incomparable “Mathematical Games” column, Hofstadter wrote the free-ranging “Metamagical Themas” column for Scientific American, from which a book of that title was later created.

Hofstadter received his doctorate in physics from the University of Oregon in 1975, and his thesis project led him to discover that crystal electrons in magnetic fields have a beautiful self-similar energy spectrum, the graph of which has since been dubbed the “Hofstadter butterfly”. A couple of decades after his Ph.D., he started avidly exploring the astonishing role played by irrational analogical leaps in progress in physics, and he plans eventually to write a book on the topic.

In the early 1960’s, Douglas Hofstadter majored in mathematics at Stanford, and it was his passion for number theory and logic that led him eventually to writing the book for which he is best known, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Later in life, he discovered a latent love for geometries of many types, and a special delight in the lowly Euclidean triangle. Here, too, a book may one day come out, focused on the discovery process in mathematics. Last but not least is Hofstadter’s passion for making abstract-seeming mathematical ideas, such as group theory and Galois theory, visualizable and very down-to-earth.

The key lodestars that constantly guide what Hofstadter himself produces and that determine what he savors in others’ work are: simplicity, clarity, structural elegance, and a relentless attempt to understand and to explain subtle ideas in terms that are as concrete and as elementary as possible.

Although Douglas Hofstadter is nominally associated with a few departments at Indiana University, he is actually left pretty much alone to pursue his multifarious interests, which he does with alacrity, celerity, vim, vigor, and vitality. Hofstadter’s own way of characterizing his personal style and his personal goals runs as follows: “perpetually in search of beauty.”

Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, 510 North Fess Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47408-3822

Hofstadter, Douglas, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid,
NY: Basic Books, l979.

Hofstadter, Douglas, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul,
together with Daniel C. Dennett (Eds.). NY: Basic Books, 1981.

Hofstadter, Douglas, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern,
NY: Basic Books, 1985.

Hofstadter, Douglas, Ambigrammi: un microcosmo ideale per lo studio della creatività,
Florence, Italy: Hopeful Monster, 1987.

Hofstadter, Douglas, Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought,
together with the Fluid Analogies Research Group. NY: Basic Books, 1995.

Hofstadter, Douglas, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language,
NY: Basic Books, 1997.

Hofstadter, Douglas, A novel versification of Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin,
NY: Basic Books, 1999.

Hofstadter, Douglas, I Am a Strange Loop,
NY: Basic Books, 2007.

Hofstadter, Douglas, Analogy as the Core of Cognition. In The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, edited by Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Book, 2001, pp. 499-538.
The article also appeared in The Best American Science Writing 2000, James Gleick and Jesse Cohen (Editors), Ecco Press, 2000.

Hofstadter, Douglas, 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 Publications, 1995, pp. 217-267.

Hofstadter, Douglas, On Seeing A’s and Seeing As.
Stanford Humanities Review 4,2 (1995) pp. 109-121.

Hofstadter, Douglas, To Err is Human; to Study Error-making is Cognitive Science.
Together with David Moser. Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1989, pp. 185-215.

Please see also the following web-site:
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/