Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is probably best known for his 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.
Hofstadter received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. He is currently (2002) a professor of cognitive science and computer science (among others) at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is the son of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter.
Douglas is multilingual, having spent his youth in Geneva. He spent a few years in Sweden in the mid 1960s and understands Swedish. He speaks Italian, English, French, German and some Russian. In LTbdM he describes himself as a pilingual and an oligoglot (speaker of few languages).
His interests include themes of the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation, and mathematical games.
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The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
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