"Will answer this evening. :-)"
RadioA, as a fan of many of your posts I would love to see this, please ping me when you reply.
BTW ever read 'Godel, Escher, Bach an Eternal Golden Braid' by ?? can't remember his name but it's a great book. We even had an honors math course in college that spent the whole year going over it.
I had heard of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach from some enthusiastic students at Calgary, but not seen it, when I visited the Tarski's in summer 1979 in Berkeley. Noticing the Hofstadter book in Alfred's bookcase I asked him what he thought of it and he exclaimed: "awful, of course it's awful". When I asked whether he had read it he said "of course not". But when I asked him to let me borrow it he got annoyed; the publishers had sent it to him, it belonged to him, and I could not borrow it, of course not.I must add that I had been working with Tarski, that we were old friends and that it is not too far fetched to call Tarski and Gödel the two pillars of modern mathematical logic. They were of the same generation and had come to America during the late thirties from Poland and from Austria respectively. But they were temperamentally totally different personalities. Tarski was an empire builder.
Anyway, I went straight to Cody's and bought the Hofstadter book, fervently hoping that I would find it wonderful and could teach Alfred a lesson about his prejudices. Well, Alfred had been right after all. When I returned to Calgary at the end of the summer I found a copy of the Hofstadter book waiting for me with a note from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy asking me to review it. I actually had fun doing that review, I was younger then and instead of getting upset I enjoyed making it into a twin enterprise of a parody and a minimal no-nonsense account of Gödel's proof.
I wonder how Hofstadter, an Edge.org contributor, feels about these remarks by Huber-Dyson, also an Edge.org contributor?
Douglas Hofstadter.
The shame of it is that while his first book was a brilliant exposition of computational theory, his later books fell off the wagon and ended up in a ditch. Still GEB is a classic AI-oriented book on basic computational theory.