Product Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book applies Godel's seminal contribution to modern mathematics to the study of the human mind and the development of artificial intelligence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #552361 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 824 pages

Amazon.com Review
Everything is a symbol, and symbols can combine to form patterns. Patterns are beautiful and revelatory of larger truths. These are the central ideas in the thinking of Kurt Gödel, M.C. Escher, and Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps the three greatest minds of the past quarter-millennium. In a stunning work of humanism, Hofstadter ties together the work of mathematician Gödel, graphic artist Escher, and composer Bach.

Gödel, Escher, Bach, a Pulitzer prize-winning treatise on genius, explores the workings of brilliant people's brains with the help of historical examples and brainteaser puzzles. Not for the dim or the lazy, this book shows you, more clearly than most any other, what it means to see symbols and patterns where others see only the universe. Touching on math, computers, literature, music, and artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a challenging and potentially life-changing piece of writing.

From the Inside Flap
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book applies Godel's seminal contribution to modern mathematics to the study of the human mind and the development of artificial intelligence.

About the Author
Douglas R. Hofstadter is College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. His previous books are the Pulitzer Prizewinning Gödel, Escher, Bach; Metamagical Themas, The Mind’s I, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Le Ton Beau de Marot, and Eugene Onegin.

Customer Reviews

Computer Science
Godel, Escher and Bach, written by Douglas Hofstadter, while the title would suggest it is discussion of a mathematician, an artist, and a composer, is a complex examination of how human beings develop perception and meaning. More specifically, the book explores, through a series of dialogues and narrations, how symbols, thought and language are all intertwined and how reality is essentially a composition of overlapping meanings and perceptions. The book challenges the reader to observe the system of symbolic meanings around him or her objectively.

An Incredible Intellectual Romp
Early this summer at a computer programming conference I found myself with a group of programmers of different ages and nationalities. The one thing we all had in common is that we'd read this book while in high school or college and found it fascinating. For some of us the book was life changing. Most of us rediscovered a love of math that our high school education had nearly destroyed. Many of us became programmers because of it. The book may seem to be dated in some respects after 20 plus years, but on the whole it is as relevant and exciting today as it was when it was first published.

Literate, Facinating, Readable
This is a work of incredible depth and scope. From number theory to cognition to genetics, Hofstadter offers some incredible insights about the way we and the world work. One word of advice: don't worry if you can't understand all of his ideas. This book is so chock-full of content that most readers could spend a decade plowing through it, only to find that they've missed something important. Just read it. You'll get some of it, and that's enough.