Good morning! Today the world’s only self-declared pilingual person turns 78. A (or the) pilingual person has concluded that their degree of mastery of languages comes to 3.14159… And their name is Douglas R. Hoftstadter.
Hofstadter was born in New York City, and grew up in California when his family moved because his father, physicist Robert Hofstadter, became a professor. If the name “Robert Hofstadter” sounds familiar, it might be because of the Nobel prize he won. His son Douglas hasn’t (yet) won a Nobel, but that may be because the Nobel committee doesn’t have a category for cognitive and computer science.
Hofstadter has been Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, in the US, since 1986. He originally arrived at the school in 1977, when he launched a research program into artificial intelligence. He’s still working on AI, but he’s since relabeled it, or at least his own area of it, as “cognitive science research.”
He has a very long list of accomplishments, and has been something of a public intellectual thanks to his books. His first was the 1978 Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (highly recommended!), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In the book he uses the lives and works of Kurt Gödel, M.C. Escher, and Johann Sebastian Bach to trace how basic ideas in mathematics and systems can combine to form very complex wholes. In fact that’s the basis of his theory of consciousness: that it an “emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain.”
Hofstadter is also an artist, and his work is exhibited in a number of galleries. Some of his pieces are “ambigrams,” which refers to a calligraphic word or phrase that can be read two ways — sometimes right-to-left and left-to-right, and sometimes reflected vertically. Some of his ambigrams appear in his books. He also coined “ambigram,” a word that’s slowly increasing in usage.
Hofstadter is also fond of anagrams, and when he took over the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1981 to 1983, he retitled it Metamagical Themas. He’s a longtime critic of sexist language, and published the satirical A Person Paper on Purity in Language under the name “William Satire” (a reference to William Safire.
But that’s not all; Hofstadter is also a musician and composer. He’s released at least one CD, and his compositions for piano have been performed by Brian Jones, Gitanjali Mathur, and Janet Jackson (the pianist, not the pop star).
Hofstadter’s name appears on the Hofstadter’s Butterfly, a fractal graph of high-energy electrons (or something like that) and the well-known-in-computing Hofstadter’s Law (“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”) He’s pretty skeptical of current AI research and approaches, and made an odd comment when told that his work had inspired many students to go into computing and AI. He said that was very nice, but he didn’t have any interest in computers. And to be perfectly clear, his formal title is “Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature.”
