"Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter
A beautiful multidisciplinary dive into number theory, self-reference, consciousness art and much more. It's written in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Really enjoying it right now

If you haven't read the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach - you need to do yourself a favor and do so. It explores the ideas of recursion, logic, infinity, and so much more in one beautifully written book.

Possibly this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_E...

(That is, the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter)

Douglas Hofstadter's book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is very highly recommended reading for anyone who finds this (and the theory of computability more generally) interesting.

I've lost entire days of my life to that book!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

I just started Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, it's interesting.

I'm reminded of the chapter "Two-Part Invention" in Douglas Hofstader's "Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...

Anyone interested in this should read "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach

It's an enlightening, bewildering and very funny book about such things.

Anyone who liked this read might also like the read "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". Its such an interesting book, and teaches through very simple ways.

For those interested in the topic, I can't help but reccomend the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Also no ebook of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"

Not sure if this is technical enough, and maybe it is not at all, but it is a book that keeps inspiring me to build new things:

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

It is a long book, but there is a lot to learn there.

Tangentially related: the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter is a computer science classic that deals with incompleteness among other things (mostly self-references in formal systems) in a fun way.

I don't know if it is necessarily signalling, but I too have a dislike for this type of "reading". I think it mostly depends on the book itself - for example, you probably won't get a lot from a 15-minute summary of Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, but maybe you'll get like 70% from a book like Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. It taught me a lot about thinking about not just patterns, but metapatterns and metametapatterns.

"The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose. A truly brilliant and eminent mathematician/physicist boldly stepping up to grapple with the profound challenge of understanding how math, mind, and physics intertwine. Penrose's commentary on the role of entropy in cosmology transformed how I understand reality.

It seems like the essays they want would be similar in spirit to Douglas Hofstadter's books: "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and "I Am a Strange Loop"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

On a side note, I am currently reading "Metamagical Themas" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas), written by Douglas Hofstadter, who also wrote the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid".

"Metamagical Themas" is a very good read about a ton of different subjects, from self-referential sentences to Lisp.

If anyone is looking for a relatively simpler explanation of GIT than Gödel's own work, I suggest the beautiful but sometimes inscrutable book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter draws lines between the math, art, and music of these three giants of human creation, and it's a lot easier to read than anything written directly by Gödel.

Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" also has some good material on GIT.

I really loved CODE. Some of these suggestions are more similar to it than others, but they are all worth reading or viewing:

-"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter is more whimsical and meandering, but has a similar technique of building from the ground up.

-"The Code Book" by Simon Singh is more of a history book, but it has some of the same "feel" in the progression of complexity, even if it will not truly teach you much cryptography.

-The Feynman lectures on physics, which are probably as close as you'll get in tone: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

-And this is a video, not a book, but it stands out to me as a fantastic piece of science communication that is worthy of mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKqof77pKBc (34C3 - Free Electron Lasers)

I'm reminded of I Am a Strange Loop and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. About recursiveness being at the heart of consciousness.

One line in the article piqued my interest, as it echoes something I read somewhere else. Seeing as it comes from someone who is an absolute expert on the subject makes it even more interesting.

> "In both books, dense narrative tensions are never fully resolved..."

It has been noted that this type of recursion/layering is something that we can't help but be intrigued by. This subject is explored in great detail, and unparalleled depth, in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach[0] by Douglas Hofstadter.

He notes that this doesn't only happen in stories and is a common theme in music as well and may even be the root of what we call 'intelligence'. I think he's definitively on the right track, and I thoroughly recommend his book to anyone that has even a passing interest in mathematics, logic, philosophy, programming, music or psychology.

Of all the books I have read GEB has had the most profound impact on my life in terms of how much it made me think and evaluate the world around me and the ideas inside the book.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

This goes for everything in life. Humans suck at planning.

EDIT: http://book.personalmba.com/planning-fallacy/

“Hofstadter’s Law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” — Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

This article vastly overstates the role of closures. The connection isn't that deep - it is a simple consequence of life being a super-complex software executed in a biochemical machinery. Thus, you can find any programming construct the process of life, and argue that life wouldn't work without that.

There are lots of much more important things than closures. One example is the ability be self-referential on all levels (not to be confused with plain recursion). This blurs not only the line between code and data, but also between software and hardware. And this happens in a much deeper way than we're able to do now with things like FPGA/CPLD or hardware virtualization.

If you are really interested in that topic, I recommend the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. It is written very well and should be especially easy to understand by programmers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

If you enjoyed this article, and haven't read "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Doug Hofstadter yet, then stop reading HN immediately and order yourself a copy:

http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%83%C2%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-G...

Having read this book would, in a fair world, be worth more on your CV/resumé than a large proportion of comp-sci degrees.

Even better, go out of your front door to a real bookshop and get them to order you one. Who knows, you might speak to someone! BONUS!

The book that caused me the biggest intellectual turnaround was Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I was a teenager, recently went through Anglican confirmation, but most of my faith was based on some magical source of intelligence or consciousness (the Christian afterlife or the idea of an active god seemed to be obvious bullshit).

GEB convinced me that intelligence and consciousness could be mechanical. I already knew about chaos and fractals, so I already had the idea that mechanical things could be infinitely complicated and unpredictable. But GEB sealed the deal, and that was it: atheism.

I'll make an unconventional suggestion that, in addition to just brushing up on high-school mathematics, you should read Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter. It's a very meandering book, but it contains a lot of interesting ideas related to math and probably one of the best ways of teaching you about formal systems, which is really crucial to the axiomatic approach of "real" math.

While they can certainly penalize sites that optimize today with respect to the criteria of yesterday, that effectively just means changing the criteria of ranking. Nothing stops site owners to optimize with respect to the new criteria tomorrow. The full implications of the proposition are reminiscent of Russel's paradox, or worthy to be included in a next edition of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach book.

EDIT: small clarification

Buy them 2 books as follows:

#1: your "The Princeton Companion.." or any of the great suggestions that you got here

AND THEN

#2: "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter. Best if you can get an old, old beat up paper copy at Amazon. Tell him that if he's lucky it will take him a lifetime to actually "get it". Tell him to keep the book in sight, bedroom, studio.. why not, bathroom. And to just read it not sequentially but at random. That is the best present to a mind thirsty for knowledge.

He might not appreciate it right not, he will appreciate it 30 years from today, if he's lucky.

Obviously these lists are subjective but a couple of examples would be:

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Evolution)

MindStorms by Seymore Papert (Education)

Structure of Scientific Revolution by Thomas Kuhn (Scientific Method/ Philosophy)

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Formal Systems)

The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (Entrepreneurship)

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Peter F Druckert (Entrepreneurship but most likely because I had a quite crazy experience while reading it)

They are all books written by what I consider careful thinkers i.e. people who are able to avoid confusing what they want the world to be with what they actually observe.

They don't have to be right and can be highly subjective as long as their premise is clear and they are aware of it.

I am usually reading 3-5 books at a time but I only read computer/math books now a days.

I wonder if the benefits that the author and other people mention apply to technical books. Maybe I should pick up a fiction book or finally start reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach" again (which has been sitting on my shelf for too long).

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. I did not understand much the first time I read that book (I was 16 or so); maybe I understood well only one thing: that I wanted to understand more. That book made me clearly see what I wanted to do. (I am now a professor of mathematical physics). I should definitely read it again...

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" is one of my favorite books, and I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for Hofstadter... so I'm really disappointed and saddened to read that he (quoting from the article) "hasn't been to an artificial-intelligence conference in 30 years. 'There's no communication between me and these people,' he says of his AI peers. 'None. Zero. I don't want to talk to colleagues that I find very, very intransigent and hard to convince of anything. You know, I call them colleagues, but they’re almost not colleagues -- we can't speak to each other.'"

Hofstadter should be COLLABORATING with all those other researchers who are working with statistical methods, emulating biology, and/or pursuing other approaches! He should be looking at approaches like Geoff Hinton's deep belief networks and brain-inspired systems like Jeff Hawkins's NuPIC, and comparing and contrasting them with his own theories and findings! The converse is true too: all those other researchers should be finding ways to collaborate with Hofstadter. It could very well be that a NEW SYNTHESIS of all these different approaches will be necessary for us to understand how complex, multi-layered models consisting of a very large number of 'mindless' components ultimately produce what we call "intelligence."

All these different approaches to research are -- or at least should be -- complementary.

I would recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already read it.

I would just point out that "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is one of the books he read this year. As is Anna Karenina, which took me several months of devoted attention to read.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter
It's presented in a very non conventional way, but teaches you to think about many problems in a more "first principles" way, and connects real world problems with more abstract idea. I have read it well into my CS career and it was still worth it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

"1984" by George Orwell and "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter.

I'm reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach" and "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" in online reading groups:

http://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2yys1i/lets_start_...

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lx0/rationality_from_ai...

Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter.

It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.

The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about it: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event."

* "The history of western philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. A fun read so far (~100 pages). Russell is not afraid to tell the reader that he really dislikes Plato, and thinks he destroyed western philosophy.

* SICP (Structure and interpretation of computer programs). Learning Scheme for fun now with this book. I'm only in chapter 2 so far, but it is really fun

* "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hoefstadter. The story in one line: he have a theory that consciousness aries from "strange loops". Along the way he talks about fractals, programming, patterns in music and in pictures,...

* "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoyevskij. Fun read.

I grew up in a single-parent household back in the 70's before computers and
startups were the thing they are now and although my mom was an uneducated immigrant,
I was fortunate to grow up in the bay area and get an education at a good public school
where my teachers introduced me to

  Harold Jacobs's "Geometry"
  Nietziche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"
  Freeman Dyson's "Disturbing The Universe"
  Nigel Calder's "The Key to the Universe"
  Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man"
  Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach"

I especially loved spending time in the library, reading OMNI magazine, Scientific American
magazine (especially Martin Gardner's column) and the stories of Issac Asimov and Larry Niven.

Those authors made me want to go to college and learn from people like them - people capable
of thinking big ideas about science and civilization - and while none of those books ever
helped me raise money or start a business, they did help me help me overcome my personal
feelings of inadequacy from having come from a poor family and eventually become accepted
into a technical community which appreciated an ability to think and ask questions.

Axioms are the foundational assumptions from which formal systems of mathematics are built. Some systems of axioms are unable to prove the truth or falsity of some statements within that system. But you can add such statements to your set of axioms to form a new, larger formal system, which in turn has other indeterminate statements, and so on, thus building, in GP’s terms, an infinite playground of mathematics.

Book recommendation: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter, which I read when I was 17. I was just getting into serious programming (I would learn C later that year). I had only an inkling about things like recursion, had little appreciation for music outside of Pink Floyd, and lacked any kind of spiritual philosophy that didn't end in simple atheism or nonsense that I stole from science fiction paperbacks.

GEB got me wondering about a lot of things, and showed me how hard science and engineering and art can coexist. It's not a perfect book -- frankly, I find it rather dull reading now -- but it was an eye-opener when I was just starting out.

I quite like these. Regarding the negative comments, these stories were not intended to conform strictly to the traditional kōan form, and are clearly not expected be taken entirely seriously (the About page makes this clear!)

As a personal bonus for me, the author makes reference to the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach", of which I was somehow not previously aware. It sounds like it's right up my street.

My first thought was to suggest finding multiple English translations of a piece of Hebrew Literature you like and comparing them. Then I remembered the linked article, which is a comparison of four different English translations of the verse novel Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin. The article was written by Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University who has an essay collection called Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games). The first few essays are about self-referential sentences and a subset of those, self-replicating sentences, which you really have to read to believe. Maybe check out his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. It won the Pulitzer, but if you pick it up, just remember that when you get confused, it’s his fault, not yours.

But Winston Churchill said it best, and this is great advice: “short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all”.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/r...

https://www.powells.com/book/-9780465045662

https://www.powells.com/book/-9780465026562

Keywords that I believe would be worth mentioning:

- Lambda Calculus
- Reflective and Meta-programming
- Meta-object Protocol
- Closures
- Continuations
- Monads
- Arrows
- First-class Everything
- Stack and Register-based Programming
- XML
- Linear Algebra
- Fractal and Wavelet Image Compression
- Regular Expressions
- Clojure
- LaTeX

NB. The concepts to which the above keywords refer, may or may not have been covered by the article. The keywords themselves are however absent.

Additional reading suggestions:

- Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls
- Tom Mitchell's Machine Learning
- Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's Unix Programming Environment