One of the books that I have been planning to read for a long time is Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB), a book which is powerful enough to change the lives of those who read it (those are the good books!) and beautiful enough to be itself a work of art.
Recently, my friend Shubhendu Trivedi informed me that there was a Summer course at MIT based on the GEB book. This course was named Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey.
[ image courtesy of Justin Curry and Curran Kelleher ]
The course’s lecture notes and video lectures are available online thanks to the awesome MIT OCW program. An excerpt of the course’s description:
What do one mathematician, one artist, and one musician all have in common? Are you interested in zen Buddhism, math, fractals, logic, paradoxes, infinities, art, language, computer science, physics, music, intelligence, consciousness and unified theories? Get ready to chase me down a rabbit hole into Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Lectures will be a place for crazy ideas to bounce around as we try to pace our way through this enlightening tome.
I have been watching the video lectures. Quite interesting indeed. They discuss isomorphisms, recursion, paradoxes, infinity, logic, formal systems, fractals, and how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of “meaningless” elements.
Tags: Art, Douglas Hofstadter, GEB, Logic, Mathematics, MIT, Philosophy, Science
May 11, 2008 at 8:39 pm |
Interesting that it’s a high school course as well… seems pretty complicated!
May 11, 2008 at 9:50 pm |
The material covered in this GEB course is indeed complicated. But it’s complicated for people of all ages.
Grad students and professors are too busy and absorved in their work to be able to spend many hours thinking on the GEB book and its pearls of wisdom. High school students have the time, and (hopefully) an intact curiosity, and that makes them a perfect audience.
May 11, 2008 at 11:05 pm |
Thanks for the heads-up on the OCW media for this book. I had already put it on my list of summer reading, and I think the course materials will help. I’m a PhD mathematician but I imagine I’ll still need some alternate perspectives to make sense of that book; I read it almost 20 years ago in college and it blew my mind. This time I want to actually “get it”.
May 12, 2008 at 1:10 am |
This is one of my fav books….along with The Mind’s I. It’s not complicated by any means, but I can’t imagine reading it from cover to cover in a single sitting….it begins to lose it’s impact. Sometimes, it’s just helpful to sit down read a couple chapters….reflect….which is an important part of truly understanding anything….anyway…..then pick it back up a day or so later. The class sounds really interesting. :D
May 11, 2008 at 11:19 pm |
Rod,
I beg to disagree but will also agree, i think the book is fine. It makes you think but it is not that complicated. I may be wrong as i hear a lot of views about it being very hard and maybe my sense of reason is not that matured? LOL
The book is very profound and reading it makes an equally profound experience. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I read a lot, but very few times have i enjoyed a book like this one.
I however agree that all the book takes a lot of time. But it is worth it. And it is most probably the time factor that prevents most people from reading it. However i would still say that it is not complicated. maybe i think so because i have spent countless hours thinking about the stuff in the book.
May 12, 2008 at 8:43 pm |
That MIT course does sound incredibly interesting. I just took a class of Doug’s last semester at IU (we just got out about 2 weeks ago actually). You’d think it would be some group theory class or something (which he does teach), but nope; it was a class caled “Writing Structured Verse”- a poetry class in the comparative literature department (my major). Prof Hofstadter is truly amazing in that he is ineed, as even the title of GEB suggests, interested in mathematics, art, *and* their interrelationship. He is a stickler (that’s a a huge understatement) for structure- rythmic, syllabic, formal, sonic, and any other kind you can think of- in poetry. It was by far the most interesting class I’ve taken in college (I will be a junior next year, still undergrad), not so much because of the content but because when else are you going to get to learn poetry with a man who has a PhD in physics :)?. It was so amazing that I asked him to mentor me for an independent research project about cross-disciplinary representations of beauty next year, which he agreed to, so I’m excited to continue hearing more of his very intuitive ideas.
May 13, 2008 at 7:46 am |
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience.
I was quite intrigued by that class you mentioned. I suppose it’s this one: Writing Structured Verse. Learning poetry from a Physics PhD is indeed something unusual ;-)
May 13, 2008 at 8:24 am |
For some reason, I feel this book is highly overrated! Yeah, yeah, you can start a flame war now. :)
May 13, 2008 at 8:30 am |
It’s very possible. I mean, a book being worshipped by so many people should raise some doubts. I mean, most truly great books are anything but popular.
However, as I wrote before, I haven’t yet read the book, so I can’t really comment. The book seems very interesting, that is what I do know.
May 13, 2008 at 6:51 pm |
I hope my earlier comment on GEB:EGB (which is no doubt a wonderful book!) didn’t come across as snide! At some level, I was just kidding, especially when I mentioned the phrase “flame war”! :)
Having said so, I agree with Shubhendu’s comment immediately preceding this comment of mine. The book deals with a wide range of topics and since it is quite long (~850 pages), it is not difficult for the themes the author introduces to get obfuscated every once in a while. That tends to give a reader the impression that the book is complicated.
One should note that the author, after being annoyed(?) with the way people were interpreting his work, has now included a long preface in the latest edition of the book just to dispel all those wrong notions about his book. He writes, “GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?” This is radically different from what most people take GEB-EGB to be about: self-referential loops, zen and what-not! That’s missing the forest for the trees!
Moreover, many people tend to accumulate wrong notions about logic/mathematics – I can’t say for sure if they do the same vis-a-vis music or arts – after reading the book. The author certainly cannot be blamed for this. But when you start reading Godel’s theorems and the like, you also need to be well-prepared to understand the same. The hypotheses/assumptions have the understood very well before using the theorems. Most of the time, however, you’ll see non-specialists claiming they understand Godel’s theorems when in fact they really don’t! You only have to look at all the weird interpretations of Godel’s theorems floating around on the Internet and all the strange situations they are applied to without giving much thought to the actual context the theorems were/are placed in.
Anyway, this is getting too long! So, I’ll stop here for now.
May 13, 2008 at 7:01 pm |
Awesome comment. Right on!
Like I said, I haven’t (yet) read the book, so I can’t comment on it. The book is long, that I know. I also know that some people tend to mis-interpret some “exotic” ideas in Science (due to the fact that they don’t understand them). How many times have you heard nonsensical crap about quantum mechanics and New Age mumbo-jumbo? How many time have you heard people using the words “chaos theory” when it’s painfully obvious that they have no idea what they’re talking about. Exactly. Too many times. That is why I am suspicious when too many people love a book: it may happen that the book is truly awesome and people got the idea, or it may happen that the book is indeed excellent and people just mis-interpret it and try to turn it into something which the book is not.
Science is not supposed to give all the answers. Science is not supposed to answer existentialist and philosophical questions. Science is about understanding Nature. Bad Philosophy is left to humans to entertain themselves.
I think the book will be difficult for me for one sole reason: as a “fundamentalist” who strives to understand things from first principles, I will probably try to establish connections to what I do know already, and by doing so, I will probably take 1 week to read each page :-D
May 13, 2008 at 7:12 pm |
Yeah that comment was probably longer than the post ;)
And yes i think Vishal made the point well, The book touches upon a wide variety of topics including Zen, however the theme remains (and keeps moving about it) to explain the philosophy of some contemporary mathematics and then using that trying to explain how the meaning emerges from “meaningless” entities.
Take for instance the idea of Zen in the book.
Hofstadter like in all other instances in the book assumes that the reader has zero knowledge on the topic. So he first gives an introduction on Zen and then the teachings of the Zen monk Mumon, who gave commentaries on koans. Then coming to the relevant philosophy Hofstadter draws a parallel between the philosophy of Zen and contemporary ideas in philosophy of Mathematics. And after that immediately introduces Godel.
May 13, 2008 at 11:42 am |
I would agree with Vishal on ONLY one count. It is considered complicated. Which it is not. But it is really good.
Since it is considered complicated, it is over-rated that way. It is thought of that way as it is almost a thousand pages. So most people who start with it or just glance at it might think. “Oh i don’t think i can read that much, there is so much”. And hence that image. I think the book has a good flow, but takes a lot of time.
May 13, 2008 at 8:23 pm |
Rod,
Thanks a ton for providing a link to that excellent article! I like EDGE articles/interviews myself very much. Almost all of ‘em are so well written/presented!
May 13, 2008 at 7:24 pm |
@ Vishal, Shubhendu
Given that Gödel’s theorems popped up in previous comments, I recalled that I found some time ago an interesting article on that topic: Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth. An excerpt:
September 9, 2008 at 2:25 pm |
Wonderful book indeed, and if used as a source of inspiration, very powerful.
I still use this inspiration working on “Critique of pure reason” from Kant wich is just another overrated or misinterpreted book, but GEB:EGB definatly has its impact on my study on Kants work.
I assume beeing the only one reading Kants books with such a great amusement and humor and i specualate those are intended by Kant, who is usually falsely considered a person without any humor.
I even laugh out aloud sometimes, really enjoying this.
Part of this joy i do relate to GEB.