Gödel, Escher, Bach
Also known as Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, GEB
Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book on self-reference, minds and meaning through Gödel, Escher and Bach.
At a glance
Key ideas
Strange loops, Dialogues, Gödel's incompleteness …
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Martin Gardner, Translation
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- Hofstadter traces themes shared by the logician Kurt Gödel, the artist M.
- C.
- Escher and the composer J.
- S.
- Bach.
- Through dialogues, puzzles and analysis, he explains how meaning can arise from meaningless parts, and explores self-reference, formal systems and the limits of symbolic representation.
- He said the book is really about how a mind emerges from neurons.
- Its central idea is the strange loop.
Why it matters
- It won the Pulitzer Prize and drew a generation of readers into logic, computing and the question of how minds arise.
Key facts
- Author
- Douglas Hofstadter1
- Published
- 1979, Basic Books; twentieth-anniversary edition 19991
- Awards
- Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; National Book Award for Science Hardcover1
- Follow-up
- I Am a Strange Loop (2007), written because readers missed that strange loops were the central theme1
Key ideas
-
Strange loops1
Self-referential structures, the book's central theme.
-
Dialogues1
Chapters alternate with dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise, borrowed from Zeno and Lewis Carroll, some written as musical canons.
-
Gödel's incompleteness1
Illustrated by a record player that destroys itself playing a record made to break it.
-
Quines1
A term he invented, after Willard Van Orman Quine, for programs that print their own source code.
-
The MU puzzle1
Contrasts reasoning inside a formal system with reasoning about it.
Reception
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