Biographer Susan Baker writes that Hofstadter, " was profoundly influenced by the political Left of the 1930's .... The philosophical impact of Marxism was so intense and direct during Hofstadter's formative years that it formed a major part of his identity crisis ....

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.

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.

Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor Robert Axelrod in his computer tournament pitting many iterated prisoner's dilemma strategies against each other, and a follow-up column discussed a similar tournament that Hofstadter and his graduate student Marek Lugowski organized.

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.

In the 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is described by Dr. Chandra as being caught in a " Hofstadter – Möbius loop ".

The books published by Hofstadter are ( the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available ):

* Gödel's Proof ( 2002 revised edition ) by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, edited by Hofstadter ( ISBN 0-8147-5816-9 ).

A typical description of the problem is given in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter

Typical of these references is Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, which accords the paradox a prominent place in a discussion of self-reference.

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.

* The femtometre, a convenient unit of length in dealing with distances inside the atomic nucleus, was coined the " fermi " by Robert Hofstadter in a 1956, and is still a term widely used.

A January 1983 Metamagical Themas column by Douglas Hofstadter, in Scientific American, was influential as was his 1985 book of the same name.

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979, discusses the ideas of self-reference and strange loops, drawing on a wide range of artistic and scientific work, including the art of M. C. Escher and the music of J. S. Bach, to illustrate ideas behind Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

The name " quine " was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, in his popular science book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in the honor of philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine ( 1908 – 2000 ), who made an extensive study of indirect self-reference, and in particular for the following paradox-producing expression, known as Quine's paradox:

* Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter ( detailed discussion and many examples )

* In Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, the various chapters are separated by dialogues between Achilles and the tortoise, inspired by Lewis Carroll ’ s works.

) In a further play on the title, Hofstadter refers to his deceased wife, to whom the book is dedicated as ma rose (" my rose "), and to himself as ton beau (" your dear ").

( Hofstadter went on to follow with an even more personal book titled I Am a Strange Loop after the death of his wife.

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.

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

Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann Brush until her death.

The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound Indiana University students was established in 1996 in her name.

In the foreword, Hofstadter explains that the book ( originally published in 1958 ) exerted a profound influence on him when he was young.

The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and nationalism.

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.

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.

Although Hofstadter claims the idea of translating his book " never crossed mind " when he was writing it, when approached with the idea by his publisher he was " very excited about seeing book in other languages, especially … French ".

Historian Richard Hofstadter ( 1948 ) emphasizes that Calhoun ’ s conception of " minority " was very different from the minorities of a century later:

Zinn regularly included it in his lists of recommended readings, and after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, Zinn wrote, " If Richard Hofstadter were adding to his book The American Political Tradition, in which he found both ' conservative ' and ' liberal ' presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, maintaining for dear life the two critical characteristics of the American system, nationalism and capitalism, Obama would fit the pattern.

Robert Hofstadter ( February 5, 1915 – November 17, 1990 ) was an American physicist.

Hofstadter was born in New York City on Feb. 5, 1915, to Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and the former Henrietta Koenigsberg.

They had three children: Laura, Molly-who was disabled and not able to communicate, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter.

From 1934 to 1939 Hofstadter was active in left-wing groups, including membership in the Young Communist League and ( for less than a year in 1938-39 ) a member of the Communist Party.

Although Hofstadter quickly became disillusioned with the Communist Party, he retained an independent left-wing standpoint well into the 1940s.

Hofstadter is 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 ).

Hofstadter taught at Stanford University from 1950 to 1985.

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

* Flint, Peter B., " Obituary: Dr. Robert Hofstadter Dies at 75 ; Won Nobel Prize in Physics in ' 61 ", The New York Times, November 19, 1990.

* Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lectures, annually presented at the Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, Department of Physics and as of March 2011 listed under individual years ' calendars in the Department's official pages at the Stanford University website

He then briefly studied at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before studying for his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter.

Schawlow and Professor Robert Hofstadter at Stanford, who also had an autistic child, teamed up to help each other find solutions to the condition.

Hofstadter, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, became the " iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus ", largely due to his emphasis on ideas and political culture rather than the day-to-day doings of politicians.

Hofstadter then studied philosophy and history at the University at Buffalo, from 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius W. Pratt.

In 1936, Hofstadter entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research.

From 1942 to 1946 Hofstadter taught history at the University of Maryland.

" Thus Hofstadter argued, " The application of depth psychology to politics, chancy though it is, has at least made us acutely aware that politics can be a projective arena for feelings and impulses that are only marginally related to the manifest issues.

Hofstadter planned to write a three-volume history of American society, but at his death from leukemia in 1970, he had only completed the first volume, America at 1750: A Social Portrait ( 1971 ).

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.

14, No. 3 ( Sep., 1941 ), pp. 457 – 477 online at JSTOR, reprinted in Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860 – 1915 ( 1944 ).