As such, his great influence on computer science is somewhat subversive and underground - his work has inspired countless research projects, but is not always formally referenced. Hofstadter has not published much in conventional academic journals (except during his early physics career, see below), preferring the freedom of expression of large books of collected ideas. Other new models based on the Copycat 'FARGitecture' include SeekWell and SeqSee, which model cognition and analogy in musical and number sequence domains respectively. The Copycat project has since grown into 'Metacat' and 'Magnificat' and has been worked on by Hofstadter and several assistants. His interests include music, themes of the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation, and mathematical games.Īt Indiana University Bloomington he co-authored with Melanie Mitchell and others, a cognitive model of 'high-level perception', Copycat, and several other models of analogy making and cognition.

languages) and an ' oligoglot' (speaker of few languages). In Le Ton beau de Marot (written in memory of his late wife Carol) he describes himself as a ' pilingual' (conversant in 3.14159. He also speaks some Russian: he translated parts of GEB into Russian, and published a verse translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he speaks Italian, French, and German his knowledge of these languages can be partly attributed to having spent a year of his youth in Geneva. Hofstadter is multilingual he spent a few years in Sweden in the mid-1960s where he learned Swedish. As of 2005, he is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. The son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter, he graduated in Mathematics at Stanford University and received his Ph.D.

Douglas richard hofstadter