Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Hardcover

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0855277572 ISBN 13: 9780855277574

Publisher: Harvester Press, 1979

Synopsis

Originally published by Penguin in 1980, when it was winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction, an anniversary edition of an illustrated examination of the nature of human thought processes.

About this title

Review:

Everything is a symbol, and symbols can combine to form patterns. Patterns are beautiful and revelatory of larger truths. 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. In a stunning work of humanism, Hofstadter ties together the work of mathematician Gödel, graphic artist Escher, and composer Bach.

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. Not for the dim or the lazy, this book shows you, more clearly than most any other, what it means to see symbols and patterns where others see only the universe. Touching on math, computers, literature, music, and artificial intelligence, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a challenging and potentially life-changing piece of writing.

From the Inside Flap:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvester Press
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0855277572
• ISBN 13: 9780855277574
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 799