[Book] Gödel, Escher, Bach

科普名作
计算机科学相关、数学相关

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid: A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, published in 1979 by Basic Books. A new preface by Hofstadter accompanied a 20th anniversary re-edition (ISBN 0465026567), which was released in 1999.

At one level, it is a book about how the creative achievements of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach interweave. As the author states: "I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object, and came up with this book."

The central theme of the book is more abstract. Hofstadter asks: "Do words and thoughts follow formal rules, or do they not?" In the preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition, Hofstadter laments that his book has been misperceived as a hodge-podge of neat things with no central theme. He stated: "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?"


哥德尔、艾舍尔、巴赫——集异璧之大成
译校者的话

　　读者打开的这本书是一本空前的奇书。
　　在计算机科学界，大家都知道这是一本杰出的科学普及名著，它以精心设计的巧妙笔法深入浅出地介绍了数理逻辑、可计算理论、人工智能等学科领域 中的许多艰深理论，然而当你翻阅它的时候，首先跳入眼帘的却是艾舍尔那些构思奇特的名画以及巴赫那些脍炙人口的曲谱，最后，你合上这本书的时候，竟会看到 封面上印着“普利策文学奖”的字样。
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