HOFSTADTER, DOUGLAS

College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science, Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Psychology, Indiana University

Douglas Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is also Director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. In addition, he is a professor in several departments, ranging from Computer Science to Psychology and Comparative Literature.

His first book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid", won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1980. Aside from his pioneering work in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, Hofstadter has done research that has had a wide impact in theoretical physics, has done work in various areas of mathematics, has written about and composed music, has created many idiosyncratic types of visual art, has been deeply involved for many years in poetry translation and other creative types of translation, has made noteworthy contributions to our awareness of the pervasive sexism in our society, especially in the American language -- and there are yet other areas that could be mentioned.

One of Douglas Hofstadter's lifelong passions is to explore and characterize the many unconscious cognitive mechanisms that collectively underlie human creativity (to which he incidentally prefers the term "discoverativity") -- and indeed, the fact that Hofstadter's major focus in cognitive science is human creativity makes perfect sense for the precise reason that he is himself a genuine innovator and creator in many diverse fields, ranging from art to science to literature.

Hofstadter's own dozen-word self-characterization is that he is someone who is "forever in love with and in search of deep and hidden beauty".