Hofstadter's writing is characterized by an intense interaction between form and content, as is exemplified by the 20 dialogues in GEB, many of which simultaneously talk about and imitate strict musical forms used by Bach, such as canons and fugues.

Some material regarding this interplay is to be found in Hofstadter's later book Le Ton beau de Marot, which is mainly about translation.

Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics.

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 precisely one brain.

In 1995, Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book ever sold by Amazon. com.

( The ruleset was actually first published in Douglas Hofstadter's column Metamagical Themas in Scientific American in June 1982.

This can be found by taking the first word of each paragraph, to reveal: Hofstadter's Contracrostipunctus Acrostically Backwards Spells ' J.

* July-Amazon. com, incorporated a year earlier by Jeff Bezos in Washington ( state ) as an online bookstore, sells its first book, Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

His name is derived from " GEB ", the abbreviation for Hofstadter's first book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid ; the letters appear in his last name, permuted in his first name, and permuted again in his initials.

Thus something as simple as a newspaper might be specified to six levels, as in Douglas Hofstadter's illustration of that ambiguity, with a progression from abstract to concrete in Gödel, Escher, Bach ( 1979 ):

The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, and is further elaborated in Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007.

In Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, there is a narrative between Achilles and the Tortoise ( characters borrowed from Lewis Carroll, who in turn borrowed them from Zeno ), and within this story they find a book entitled " Provocative Adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise Taking Place in Sundry Spots of the Globe ", which they begin to read, the Tortoise taking the part of the Tortoise, and Achilles taking the part of Achilles.

* Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach ( 1979 ) includes a dialogue entitled " SHRDLU, Toy of Man's Designing " between fictional programmer " Eta Oin " and the artificial-intelligence program SHRDLU.

Another theory asserts the name was chosen based on the frequency of English alphabet letters due in part to the then current popularity of Douglas Hofstadter's 1980 book Gödel, Escher, Bach which used ETAOIN, etc., to capitalize on popularity and current hip-ness.

One of the most lucid statements of a Gödel based anti-mechanism argument can be found in Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

This idea is found in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, in a discussion of the relationship between formal languages and number theory: “... it is in the nature of any formalization of number theory that its metalanguage is embedded within it .”.

This is a reference to Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach in which there exists a sentient ant colony, with the ants acting as neurons.

Hofstadter's Law was a part of Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

Most of Hofstadter's books are characterized by 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.

book cover to Douglas Hofstadter's GEB ( 20th anniversary edition.

One theme of this book is the loss of Hofstadter's wife Carol, who died of a brain tumor while the book was being written ; she also created one of the numerous translations of Marot's poem presented in the book.

Many other topics are also mentioned, all in Hofstadter's usual easy, approachable style.

Theseus's paradox bears also on the question of virtual human identity discussed in Douglas Hofstadter's and Daniel Dennett's The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul ( 1981 ).

Although, as Bruce Kuklik notes, it still " owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background ", it was ironic and paradoxical in dealing with political leaders from the Revolution to the present.

* NF Reviews-bibliographic page with reviews of several of Hofstadter's books

Douglas Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot, deals with the problems of translation, and includes several dozen different translations of Marot's poem A une damoyselle malade.

These historians point out several of Hofstadter's misconceptions of the Populists and the Progressives.

Hofstadter later recognized ( what he saw as ) the influence of Darwinist and other evolutionary ideas upon those with collectivist views, enough to devise a term for the phenomenon, “ Darwinist collectivism .” Before Hofstadter's work the use of the term in English academic journals was quite rare.

Regardless, some of Hofstadter's arguments have since been proven to be mistaken by contemporary and later historians including Norman Pollack, C. Vann Woodward, Lawrence Goodwyn and Robert Wiebe.

Most of Gebstadter's books are published by Acidic Books, a fictional publisher in Perth, Australia ; this corresponds to Hofstadter's publisher Basic Books of New York.

One of Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American concerned the damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book Metamagical Themas are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire entitled " A Person Paper on Purity in Language ", in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion at sexism and sexist language.

Hofstadter's book Le Ton beau de Marot is dedicated to their two children and its dedication reads " To M. & D., living sparks of their Mommy's soul ".

Hofstadter is related by marriage to the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould: Hofstadter's paternal aunt Shirley Hofstadter was married to Gould's maternal uncle Herbert Rosenberg.

So the difference between the video-feedback loop and our strange loops, our " I " s, is that while the former converts light to the same pattern on a screen, the latter categorizes a pattern and outputs its essence, so that as we get closer and closer to our essence, we get further down our strange loop ( according to Hofstadter's book ' I am a Strange Loop ').

A striking model of much interest in this context is the Azbel-Harper-Hofstadter model whose quantum phase diagram is the Hofstadter's butterfly shown in the figure.

Robert Hofstadter's Erdős number is 5.

Hofstadter's Tortoise is of the male sex, though the Tortoise's sex is never specified by Carroll.

The title is an example of wordplay: it is an anagram of Mathematical Games, the title of Martin Gardner's column that Hofstadter's column succeeded in Scientific American.

Princeton University economist Tim Leonard ( 2009 ) has argued, in the article Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism, that Hofstadter's influential characterization of Spencer is flawed.

The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name " Metacat " by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall.

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.

The discovery was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961 together with Robert Hofstadter's research of electron scattering in atomic nuclei.

But it was Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition that made the most lasting impression.

* Hofstadter, Robert, " Robert Hofstadter's speech at the Nobel Banquet ", The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, December 10, 1961.

However, Hofstadter's reading of the idea of ‘ translation ’ goes deeper than simply that of translating between languages.