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Loading... Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braidby Douglas R. HofstadterSeries: Godel, Escher, Bach series (1)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A fascinating, wide-ranging, mind-bending, pulitzer prize-winning book on mathematics, art, music, creativity, self-reference, and the nature of consciousness. (  ) byorgey | Oct 10, 2009 |  Fascinating! Full of all kinds of neat, interesting stuff, unbelievably inventive wordplay and structural experiments! I picked it up because of Gödel and logic and so on, but the book is more than that, more than just the names in its title. It does give an introduction to Gödel's theorems, Bach's music and Escher's art, but the underlying theme is more general, related to abstract formal systems and their capabilities. I just love it. I bought the 20th anniversary edition after the first read, it's a must for rereading. ( )1  jmattas | Sep 4, 2009 | I loved the cleverness, and I loved the way it prodded me to think. Many times, I experienced that delightful realization you get, like sunlight bursting from behind clouds, when you suddenly notice that a meta-message is in play, and you go back to re-read a passage and see it in an entirely new light. Intellectual play. However, I bailed at the three-quarters point, a while after Hofstadter stated almost explicitly that the book has a false ending, padded with fluff so that the meta-experience of holding a physical book did not prematurely let you know when you were approaching the end of the work. It didn't seem fair. I _like_ that physical cue of my progress, yet I also have to respect Hofstadter for flouting even that comfortable expectation. (Couldn't muster the fortitude to keep plowing through, though.) (  )1 spyderella | Aug 12, 2009 | "Help. My mind has bent, and now I cannot unbend it!" That was me after I finished reading Godel, Escher, Bach. This book, which is about, well, everything, takes the reader on a journey through mathematics, music, and art, and gives it a little twist just to keep one on one's mental toes. A major theme is recursion, or self-referencing. If you're at all familiar with any of the GEBs, you'll see this in Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Escher's Drawing Hands, and Bach's Crab Canon. Other mathematicians, artists, and musicians are introduced as well, providing more on this Eternal Golden Braid. Not only does Hofstadter give us so much on logical themes, but he also gives the reader some puzzles too, particularly some that require multiple steps (though the answers are right in front of the reader's face at times). This book is a must read for one who considers oneself a student of mathematics, art, or even music, or who has a strong admiration for most of these things. I suppose computer scientists could read it too. Nevertheless, this is a great book, and a challenge, but definitely worth the read. ( )3 aethercowboy | Aug 11, 2009 | I really liked this when I first read it (high school, I think) - it's sort of a young geek's dream book. But looking back I find its arguments about consciousness largely unconvincing. Still worth it for the exposition of Godel, etc., though. ( ) matthewbasil | Jul 10, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0465026567, Paperback)Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers. The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. --Richard Dragan Topics Covered: J.S. Bach, M.C. Escher, Kurt Gödel: biographical information and work, artificial intelligence (AI) history and theories, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, formal and informal systems, number theory, form in mathematics, figure and ground, consistency, completeness, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, recursive structures, theories of meaning, propositional calculus, typographical number theory, Zen and mathematics, levels of description and computers; theory of mind: neurons, minds and thoughts; undecidability; self-reference and self-representation; Turing test for machine intelligence. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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