Word: escher
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...computer scientist, and his collaborator Daniel C. Dennett, a philosophy expert, avoid technical jargon and esoteric language throughout the book. Hofstadter is, or course, well practiced at writing for the layman; he authors a regular column in Scientific American and won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Godel, EScher, and Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Working with Hofstadter, Dennett--author of Branistorms:- Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology--expands on his own explanations of artificial intelligence, computers and the unity or divisibility of the soul...
...Great Names in the annals of symmetry and self-reference. "MARTIN GARDNER" and "ASIMOV" both preserve their shape upside-down. Read "BORGES" a second time: It's "JORGE" written over "LUIS." And in a tip of the hat to Inversions's literary soulmate, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, Kim has created a series of appropriate representations of those three names...
Douglas R. Hofstadter, an assistant professor of computer science at Indiana University and Pulitzer-prizewinning author (Gödel, Escher, Bach), writes in the March issue of Scientific American: "If you are destined to solve the unscrambling problem at all, it will take you somewhere between five hours and a year." Among other hazards, Hofstadter lists Cubitis magikia, "a severe mental disorder accompanied by itching of the fingertips that can be relieved only by prolonged contact" with the cube. Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, a former mayor of Manchester, England, had to be operated on for tendinitis of the thumb after...
Miss also tricks the viewer by setting up apparently ordinary situations and then altering them. The effect is somewhat like the Escher prints in which water flows uphill, straight columns bend, and roofs and ceiling invert on each other. Mirror Way at the Fogg is an elaborate experiment in such deception: pathways are blocked, stairs run up into floors, a ladder leads up to a slatted roof which then leads nowhere. In short, the structure is illogical--it feigns functionalism and yet refuses to function...