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.

A strange loop hierarchy, however, is " tangled " ( Hofstadter refers to this as a " heterarchy "), in that there is no well defined highest or lowest level ; moving through the levels, one eventually returns to the starting point, i. e., the original level.

The " strangeness " of a strange loop comes from our way of perception, because we categorize our input in a small number of ' symbols ' ( by which Hofstadter means groups of neurons standing for one thing in the outside world ).

Robert Hofstadter coined the term fermi ( unit ), symbol fm, in honor of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi ( 1901 – 1954 ), one of the founders of nuclear physics, in Hofstadter's 1956 paper published in the Reviews of Modern Physics journal, " Electron Scattering and Nuclear Structure ".

Stanford University's Department of Physics credits Hofstadter with being " one of the principal scientists who developed the Compton Observatory.

* Stanford University has an annual lecture series named after Hofstadter, the Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lectures, which consists of two lectures each year, one oriented toward the general public and the other oriented toward scientists.

Translation between frames of reference — languages, cultures, modes of expression, or indeed between one person's thoughts and another — becomes an element in many of the same concepts Hofstadter has addressed in prior works, such as reference and self-reference, structure and function, and artificial intelligence.

Different applications of the term are not fully isomorphic in the sense described by Douglas Hofstadter as follows: “ The word ‘ isomorphism ’ applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where ‘ corresponding ’ means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures .” The lack of such an isomorphism means that various definitions are in some degree mutually inconsistent.

He was considered, along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both by scholars and by the general public.

This is particularly interesting, in that Hofstadter is widely viewed as one of the better known skeptics of such argument:

He even employed one, Mike Wallace, to collaborate with him on American Violence: A Documentary History ( 1970 ); about the book, Hofstadter student Eric Foner said that it " utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements ".

As a senior professor at a leading graduate university, Hofstadter directed more than one hundred finished doctoral dissertations but gave his graduate students only cursory attention ; that academic latitude enabled them to find their own models of history.

He then suggests that this was “ just one more piece of evidence for the rather recursive Hofstadter ’ s Law .”

Hofstadter also noted that " sexual freedom " is a vice frequently attributed to the conspiracist's target group, noting that " very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious, while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.

A trivial example of the specific form of the Eliza effect, given by Douglas Hofstadter, involves an automated teller machine which displays the words " THANK YOU " at the end of a transaction.

In mathematics, the Hofstadter Female and Male sequences are an example of a pair of integer sequences defined in a mutually recursive manner.

Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of free will ( or, as Hofstadter described it, sphexishness ).

Richard Hofstadter, for example, in 1955 wrote that prohibition, " was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform " that " was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus ".

For example, four very important open questions are the proton spin puzzle, the EMC effect, the distributions of electric charges of the nucleons found by Hofstadter in 1956, and the ad hoc CKM matrix elements.

It is referenced in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, who calls it an example of a strange loop.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter ( born February 15, 1945 ) is an American professor of cognitive science whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics.

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.

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language ( ISBN 0-465-08645-4 ), published by Basic Books in 1997, is a book by Douglas Hofstadter in which he explores the meaning, strengths, failings, and beauty of translation.

Hofstadter himself refers to it as " my ruminations on the art of translation ".

Douglas Hofstadter published a translation in 1999, again preserving the Onegin stanzas, after having summarised the controversy ( and severely criticised Nabokov's attitude towards verse translation ) in his book Le Ton beau de Marot.

* 1916 – Richard Hofstadter, American historian ( d. 1970 )

Richard Hofstadter has traced the sentimental attachment to the rural way of life, which he describes as " a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.

" Hofstadter notes that to call this a " myth " is not to imply that the idea is simply false.

* Hofstadter, Richard.

The historian Richard Hofstadter addressed the role of paranoia and conspiracism throughout American history in his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, published in 1964.

Within philosophy familiar names include Daniel Dennett who writes from a computational systems perspective, John Searle known for his controversial Chinese room, Jerry Fodor who advocates functionalism, and Douglas Hofstadter, famous for writing Gödel, Escher, Bach, which questions the nature of words and thought.

Other thinkers, such as Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.

Hofstadter was born in New York City, the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter.

In April 2009 Hofstadter was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Both inside and outside his professional work, Hofstadter is driven by the pursuit of beauty.

( The term " ambigram " was invented by Hofstadter in 1984 and has since been taken up by many ambigrammists all over the world.

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.

Both in his writing and in his teaching, Hofstadter stresses the concrete, constantly using examples and analogies, and avoids the abstract.

Hofstadter is passionate about languages.

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 ).

Aside from Eugene Onegin, Hofstadter has translated many other poems ( always respecting their formal constraints ), and two other 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.

Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity ( the hypothetical moment at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence ), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic.

Hofstadter was also an invited panelist at the first Singularity Summit, held at Stanford in May 2006.

Hofstadter expressed doubt about the likelihood of the singularity coming to pass in the foreseeable future.