Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

HOFSTADTER, Douglas R.

Item Number: 25097

New York: Basic Books, 1979.

First edition of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Octavo, original brown cloth. Signed by Douglas Hofstadter on the title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with some toning to the spine. Uncommon signed.

Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.