is a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University at Bloomington. In 1980 he received the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. His scholarly work focuses on the making of analogies as the basis of human thought, and the Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts that he delivered in 2006 relate to this central concern, as does Surfaces and Essences (which he co-wrote with Emmanuel Sander).
Furthermore, his I Am a Strange Loop is a contribution to the study of the nature of consciousness. Dr Hofstadter also has an abiding interest in language; his Le Ton Beau de Marot is an extended set of meditations on the art of translation, and he has published a verse translation of Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin as well as a translation of The Discovery of Dawn, a novel by Walter Veltroni. His interests also include music and the visual arts (especially that of the ambigram). He has declared himself to be ‘obsessed with clarity in communication, both oral and written’ and ‘perpetually driven by a search for beauty’.
