Douglas Hofstadter

Description

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (abbreviated as GEB) which was published in 1979, and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. <p>The son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, he graduated in Mathematics at Stanford University in 1965 and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. As of 2005, he is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. <p>Hofstadter is multilingual. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he also speaks Italian and French fluently. He spent several months in Sweden in the mid-1960s, where he learned some Swedish, and has also studied Spanish, German, Dutch, ...