as small as a world and as large as alone

1:54pm November 9, 2013

clatterbane:

mindfuckmath:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

If there is any book that is a must read for any mathematically inclined person, it is Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach. GEB explores Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, the art of MC Escher and Rene Magritte, the music of Bach and John Cage, the work of Alan Turing, recursion, symmetry, tesselations, paradoxes, Zen, Fibonacci numbers, prime numbers, Fermat’s Last Theorem, loops, puzzles, haiku, isomorphism, logic, symbols, infinity, DNA, pattern recognition, the collective consciousness of ants, computer programming, artificial intelligence, and bad puns to offer an explanation on the nature of intelligence and consciousness. It’s not easy reading and it is dated but if you’ve made it this far have no doubt - Gödel Escher Bach will blow your mind as it simultaneously expands it.

Reminder to finally read this when I have the spoons. We have a copy.

I can’t read it.  I’ve tried a million times.  Doesn’t happen.  Nothing at all makes sense.  

And if the book deals with ‘patterns’, it probably means something entirely different than what I mean when I say that word.  (But that would explain why so many people use it for something very abstract and totally unconnected.)

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