Douglas Hofstadter for Curious Cognitive Explorer

Описание: Douglas Hofstadter received the Choose Creativity Award for Curious Cognitive Explorer on June 3, 2025. Doug’s unique ability to synthesize seemingly disparate domains into a coherent and engaging exploration of consciousness and intelligence has captivated and inspired thinkers across the globe. No less than LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman described in a speech last year how reading Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid started him on his career path and lifelong fascination with AI. Doug’s 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop expanded on those themes, captivating another generation ranging from philosophers like NYU’s David Chalmers and Columbia’s Achille Varzi to musicians like Liz Phair, who wrote a song called “Strange Loop.” Playwright Michael R. Jackson won Pulitzer and Tony Awards in 2020 for his musical, A Strange Loop, inspired by Doug’s book.


"My self-description as of March 2025" by Douglas Hofstadter

I was born in Manhattan in 1945 and grew up mostly on the Stanford campus in California. As a teen-ager, I was passionate about math and physics, and in 1965 I earned a B.S. in math from Stanford, and ten years later, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Oregon. In my doctoral research I had the good luck of discovering a striking graph that looks a little bit like a butterfly, and is made up of infinitely many tiny copies of itself. It actually predicts aspects of the behavior of electrons in a crystal in a magnetic field, and physicists call it the “Hofstadter Butterfly”. Ever since I attended the International School in Geneva, Switzerland for the year 1958–59, I’ve been in love with foreign languages, and I jocularly call myself “pilingual”, meaning that the sum of all the languages I speak is not a whole number like 2 or 10, but is somewhere vaguely between 3 and 4, with English counting as 1.0, French about 0.8, Italian about 0.7, and a few other languages at levels like 0.5 or 0.3 or below, all sadly suffering from neglect (“Use it or lose it”). I’ve been on the faculty of Indiana University in Bloomington for almost five decades. My title here is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, and I’ve been given a generously long leash in my teaching. For example, over the past decade I’ve given seminars on such topics as “Strange Loops and Consciousness”, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition”, “Ambigrams and Creativity”, “Ideas about Humor”, “The Blurriness of Categories and Why You Can’t Count Anything”, “Solving and Inventing Crossword Puzzles”, “Writing Structured Verse”, “Sexist Language and the Unconscious Halos of Words”, “Reading Aloud The Catcher in the Rye”, “Fugues, Canons, and Inventions”, and so on. Quite a cornucopia. To people other than my family and friends, I am known mostly for my books, which include Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979); The Mind’s I (1981); Metamagical Themas (1985); Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (1995); Le Ton beau de Marot (1997); I Am a Strange Loop (2007); Translator, Trader (2009); and Surfaces and Essences (2013), as well as my 1999 verse translation of Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. In July of 2025, my newest book Ambigrammia: Between Creation and Discovery (for short, ABCD) will be published, and it will hopefully be followed by a companion volume entitled My Wild Grace Chase. Aside from my long-term involvement in cognitive science and writing, I am actively engaged in art, music, dance, and the art of translation. I have two grown children — Danny, 37 (who is a conservationist in northern California), and Monica, 33 (who is an art therapist in Brooklyn) — with my late wife Carol Brush Hofstadter, who died in Italy 32 years ago. I met my current wife Baofen Lin in a chacha class in 2010, and we were married in 2012. Baofen and I have two cute grandchildren, Ian and Fiona.