Kris Jordan

I picked up two books I intend to read over the coming weeks. Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” and “I Am a Strange Loop”. A column in a recent Time magazine turned me on to the works. I find it fascinating neither myself nor my circle of closest friends had heard of GEB. From all that I gather it is a classic amongst the nerdliest of the nerds. (Aside: Nerdliest and nerdliness are not actually words, however, I use them with clairvoyance. They will be ‘real words’ one day.)

Hofstadter finds mysterious beauty in what he refers to as ’strange loops’. Examples include many of Escher’s works (thumbnail below), Bach’s Endlessly Rising Canon, and Godel’s incompleteness. Each toys with the concept of infinity through paradoxical self-referencing loops. Perhaps the cutest logical example is drawn from Epimenides’ paradox.

Epimenides was a Cretan who made one immortal statement: “All Cretans are liars.”

- or -

The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.

Hofstadter, a computer scientist himself, writes in a peculiar way. Interweaving examples of the ’strange loops’ of Godel, Escher, and Bach, with other excerpts driven by formal grammars and math makes for an intellectually neat endeavor.

Being only partially through GEB I can’t draw any conclusions other than so far so fun.