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Topic: Goedel, Escher, Bach

	A Beautiful Mind: Rebecca Goldstein's Goedel
		Like each of these schema-altering concepts, Goedel's theorems have been misunderstood and misappropriated by all the usual suspects in cerebral larceny: postmodernists, creationists, people who think "It all depends on what you mean by genocide" is a moral argument.
		Goedel's proofs scuppered the positivism of the famed Vienna Circle, which was embodied most charismatically by Ludwig Wittgenstein, actually more of a tangential member.
		Goldstein elegantly compares Goedel's winning style of being able to have his cake and pop out of it too to the dramatic conceit of the "play within a play." Specifically, the kind where the characters of the one become "actors" within the other and then use that medium say relevant things about their character selves.
	www.snarksmith.com /essays/goedel.html (1860 words)

	Goedel, Escher, Bach
		J.S. Bach was the greatest composer in the period musical historians call the Baroque era, and in fact, a towering figure in the entire history of music worldwide.
		He wrote vast amounts of inspired music, and is still regarded by many as the greatest master of counterpoint in any era of which there is an accurate record.
		Bach was German, a Lutheran, and was prolific in ways other than musical - he had about 20 kids.
	home.earthlink.net /~paulcarr/books/GEB.html (351 words)

	Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid / Douglas R. Hofstadter
		Before each of GEB's twenty chapters, Hofstadter includes a dialogue, in which Achilles, the Tortoise, and their company discuss various aspects that will later be examined by the author in the chapter to follow.
		The musical example that Hofstadter uses is Bach's Sonatas for Unaccompanied Violin, where the listeners' imagination fill in “between the notes” as the violin plays, and one often imagines hearing the accompanying piano.
		Other issues discussed in GEB include, for example, self-reference and self-representation, both of which Hofstadter considers to be crucial parts of any attempt to understand what intelligence really is. Self-reference (self-ref for short) is the notion of an object, physical or conceptual, that references its own self in some manner.
	www.forum2.org /tal/books/geb.html (1183 words)

	The New York Review of Books: The Dream of Mind and Machine
		But more importantly, it is one of the themes of Gödel, Escher, Bach that while there may be a formal system underlying all mental activity, the mind somehow transcends the formal system which supports it.
		Such "strange loops," he claims, may even be at the heart of life itself; in one of his more elaborate and daring metaphors, Hofstadter examines the transfer of information within the cell and finds the same formal complexities he found in mathematical logic and the human brain.
		Escher's drawings are often amusing tricks or puzzles, exploiting self-reference, level interaction, and figure/ground play.
	www.nybooks.com /articles/7598 (5252 words)

	Gödel, Escher, Bach - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid: A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Caroll (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979 by Basic Books.
		TNT is an illustration of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and further analogies for it occur in the book, for example a phonograph which destroys itself by playing a record entitled "I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X".
		Call stacks are also discussed in GEB as one dialog describes the adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise as they make use of "pushing" and "popping" tonics.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach (1010 words)

	Presidential Lectures: Douglas R. Hofstadter
		Perhaps a better analogy is the “core” of “core curriculum,” for GEB has certainly become a centerpiece in the education of many students of artificial intelligence, intelligent artifice, the mind, and the “I” —; not to mention the more traditional fields of computer science, psychology, linguistics, et al.
		Not that GEB had those either, but many people seemed to see something vaguely along those lines in it....” Perhaps what these readers mistook for “glib technological glitz” in GEB is actually something they would also find in abundance in Le Ton beau de Marot: Hofstadter's characteristic charisma.
		In a place analogous to GEB’s inter-chapter dialogues, Le Ton beau’s chapters are separated (or joined?) by poetic interludes of translation and discussion, the pages of which are numbered separately to enhance the sense that this is a distinct structural part of the book.
	prelectur.stanford.edu /lecturers/hofstadter (1879 words)

	Gödel, Escher, Bach - 20th Anniversary Edition / Douglas R. Hofstadter
		His explanation goes on, and clarifies at least one thing: despite its beautiful playfulness, GEB is a serious book presenting a serious theory about consciousness.
		Wilder suggestions went as far as releasing GEB with a CD-ROM including Escher's art, Bach's works and recordings of all of GEB's dialogues by professional narrators.
		The CD-ROM suggestion was turned down because Hofstadter “intended GEB as a book, not as a multimedia circus, and a book it shall remain”.
	tal.forum2.org /geb20 (1051 words)

	Godel/Escher/Bach Symposium
		Bach - and they play a central role in how his music is represented in cognition.
		The experience of several decades of vision research suggests that understanding our perception of the mountainous landscape of Escher's Castrovalva is much more of a challenge than understanding the perception of Verbum.
		Toward the end of GEB, a sketch was given of an AI architecture for solving Bongard problems, which are visual-perception problems somewhat reminiscent of
	kybele.psych.cornell.edu /~edelman/CogStud/GEB.html (1042 words)

	3.11: By Analogy
		Titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, it was a rambling 777-page magnum opus crowded with dense diagrams about feedback loops, witty parables about knowledge, and intellectual puns that had mathematicians in stitches.
		Let me read you a bit from Gödel, Escher, Bach: "A 'program' which could produce brilliant music would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it.
		It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death.
	www.wired.com /wired/archive/3.11/kelly_pr.html (2545 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - Books: Godel Escher Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Paperback, 20th Anniversary ...
		By looking at the brilliant minds of mathematician Kurt Godel, graphic artist M. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, computer-science and cognitive-science professor Douglas Hofstadter ties together the aesthetic gift of pattern recognition and manipulation with theories on artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and the essence of self-awareness.
		Not at all; Godel, Escher, Bach cannot be explained without delving deeply into the structure of the book itself and the analysis of self-representation Hofstadter weaves through his appreciation of the art of Bach, the designs of Escher, and the theories of Godel.
		Goedel's Theorem may be the most universally unappreciated result of 20th Century mathematics -- at least equal in importance to Einstein's relativity.
	search.barnesandnoble.com /booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0465026567 (663 words)

	Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Gustavus MCS Blog - Gustavus Adolphus College
		It’s incredibly dense & reads more as a philosophy of science book you sip rather than a novel you chug, but it’s an incredible journey through interrelationships between all formal systems, from number theory to art to programming to DNA to music to prose to just about anything.
		It’s titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
		T.J. Morrison will be using GEB as the focus for a First Term Seminar class in Fall of 2006.
	blogs.gac.edu /mcs/?p=64 (350 words)

	What is Mathematics?
		Around Goedel's Theorem, a (hyper)textbook for students in mathematical logic
		Conversation Simulators: Modification and Comparison, starring Eliza as Space Ghost and MegaHAL as Socrates, a GEB project by Alex Krusz, 2002.
		100,000,000,000,000 sonnets by Raymond Queneau, a GEB project by Andrew Lurie, 2002.
	www-personal.umich.edu /~jlawler/geb.html (381 words)

	Amazon.co.uk: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (20th anniversary edition with a new preface by the author): ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		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.
		Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (such as undecidability, recursion, and "strange loops") accessible and remarkably entertaining.
		Linking together the music of Bach, the graphic art of Escher and the mathematical theorems of Godel, as well as ideas drawn from logic, biology, psyhcology, physics and linguistics, Hofstadter illumnintaes one of the greatest mysteries of modern science: the nature of the human thought process.
	www.amazon.co.uk /Godel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-anniversary/dp/0140289208 (1609 words)

	Reading List: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
		Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
		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.
		I don't mean to imply that those are the only topics covered; Gödel, Escher, Bach also deals with mathematics, music, art, programming, Zen, philosophy, self-reference, and everything in the world that is bright and beautiful.
	www.asimovlaws.com /reading/2004/07/gadel_escher_ba.html (244 words)

	Goedel Escher Bach
		The technical definition that I paraphrased as "interestingly powerful" is carefully and rigorously presented by both Goedel and DouglasHofstadter; it's an important aspect of understanding the GoedelsTheorem.
		The implication, in philosophical terms, is that we must always choose between knowing that there are truth's that cannot be proven (incompleteness) or knowing that there are statements that are both true and false, at the same time (inconsistency).
		I know I'm abusing Goedel's math a bit by stretching it into an unintended (and not entirely applicable) domain, but I think many of the questions we have about God fall into the category of true statements that cannot be proved within our system (nature).
	c2.com /cgi/wiki?GoedelEscherBach (2348 words)

	Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid applies Gödel's seminal contribution to modern mathematics to the study of the human mind and the development of artificial intelligence.
		Aside from 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 for mimicking human thought.
		Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is also the recipient of the American Book Award in the Science category in 1980.
	www.florin.com /authors/hofstadter-godel.html (217 words)

	Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
		Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning work is an artful and elegant masterpiece that takes the uninitiated reader on a roller coaster adventure through number theory, meta-thinking, and the nature of sentience, intelligence, and consciousness.
		Delivered with the subtle complexity of a Bach fugue, Hofstadter takes one on a cummulative journey toward understanding Gödel's theorem, with constant reference to the paradigm-pushing Escher and a pitstop in Zen, ultimately ending up face to face with the possibility of artificial intelligence.
		A favorite among spiritually oriented physics, engineering, and math types, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a veritable treasure trove of artistically executed brilliant thinking.
	www.selfknowledge.org /resources/bookreviews/geb.htm (224 words)

	MathFiction: Gödel, Escher Bach: an eternal golden braid (Douglas Hofstadter)
		Certainly, it is really a book of non-fiction and these fictional interludes are just there to be artistic examples of the points described elsewhere.
		Most criticisms of GEB I encounter seem to me to stem from people's disappoinment that the book isn't quite what THEY would like it to be, rather than any particular flaw in the book itself.
		And, if you know of any additional works of mathematical fiction that should be listed here, please write to me.
	math.cofc.edu /faculty/kasman/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf30 (594 words)

	Amazon.com: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: Books: Douglas Hofstadter (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		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.
		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.
		Touching on math, computers, literature, music, and artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a challenging and potentially life-changing piece of writing.
	www.amazon.com /Godel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0394756827 (1965 words)

	Slashdot \| Godel, Escher, Bach -- 20th Anniversary Edition
		GEB is a profoundly influential text by GeeWiz (Score:1) Tuesday April 27, @03:40AM
		GEB and Goedel's theorem by pal (Score:1) Monday April 26, @07:04PM
		GEB is a profoundly influential text by mav[LAG] (Score:1) Monday April 26, @09:59AM
	slashdot.org /books/99/04/23/147248.shtml (1670 words)

	FS 023 - Gödel Escher Bach - Course information (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Hofstadter's 1979 book "Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" explores Gödel's result with unprecedented wit, ingenuity, and insight.
		Illustrated by M.C. Escher and scored by J.S. Bach, our journey will pass through the philosophical worlds of Lewis Carroll, artificial intelligence, non-Euclidean geometry, Zeno and Zen Buddhism.
		Many thanks to Steve Abbott, who taught the first GEB first-year seminar at Middlebury, for sharing his ideas and materials.
	community.middlebury.edu /~schar/Courses/fs023.F02/info.html (1041 words)

	Powell's Books - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by
		A mixture of art, philosophy, music, math, technology, and cognitive science, the book's title only reflects one aspect of its subject matter; namely, the connection between the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel, the artist M. Escher, and the composer J. Bach.
		In the preface to the 20th-anniversary edition, the author calls his book "a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter." A 1980 Pulitzer Prize winner.
		Thought-provoking and deeply satisfying, "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" is destined to remain a classic work on man's pursuit and understanding of knowledge.
	www.powells.com /biblio/1-0465026567-27 (307 words)

	Bookpool: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
		Patiently he explains and explores their manifestations not only in their original, mathematical guise but also in the analogous realms of music, verbal play, and pictures.
		“Having taken Gödel, Escher, Bach off the shelf, I indulged myself by rereading it for the first time in years.
		For me the choice is easy: I would grab a copy of copy of Douglas Hofstader's Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB) before abandoning ship.
	www.bookpool.com /sm/0465026567 (447 words)

	J. S. Bach (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Appears in my book Inversions as part of a trio of inversions in tribute to the book Gödel Escher Bach.
		As a pianist, I've always been drawn to Bach's music.
		I wrote this canon as a gift to Douglas Hofstadter when I was helping him teach a course based on the then forthcoming book Gödel Escher Bach.
	www.scottkim.com /inversions/gallery/jsbach.html (181 words)

	Amazon.fr : Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: Livres en anglais: Douglas R. Hofstadter (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Editeur : découvrez comment les clients peuvent effectuer des recherches sur le contenu de ce livre.
		Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here.
		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.
	www.amazon.fr /Godel-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567 (753 words)

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