Gödel, Escher, Bach

the review

I read between 20 and 30 books a year. Last year I dedicated most of my reading to famous or legendary books, and I have no idea what to do with this one.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is part game, part whimsical prose, and part college lecture. It is a work of literary art on its own at the same level of many of the works it illuminates.

To begin looking at the book, it's probably best to find out who these people are.

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian mathematician/philosopher who migrated to the U.S. to avoid the effects of World War II. Finishing his university-level mathematics before he even went to college, Gödel originally wanted to be a physicist, but found himself drawn into philosophy, logics, and math. His Incompleteness Theorems changed the world of formal systems. His concepts are probably some of the most quoted -- and most abused -- on the internet.

Although older, M. C. Escher was a contemporary of Gödel's. Born in The Netherlands, he was a sickly child, not excelling particularly at anything until later in life. It was in his 40s when he first started sketching impossible reality images, things like steps that keep going up in a circle, or a hand drawing a hand drawing the first hand. Because Escher's works were so intuitive, yet self-contradictory and even mathematical in nature, the internet is full of them. Anybody who's seen the introduction to the SyFy series "Warehouse 13" with the people walking on the strange staircases has seen an M.C. Escher derivative.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born 200 years before Escher or Gödel, but arguably his work has had a greater and more long-lasting impact. Born in 1685 in what is now Germany, Bach had a family full of musicians and learned music and composition at an extremely early age. Working at the height of the Baroque Era, his compositions had depth, intricate workings, and an almost mathematical precision. The Brandenburg Concertos still rank as one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. In some important ways, all modern music has Bach as a forbearer. (Side note: if you love to listen to music while coding, load up your iPod with something like this collection of Bach works and hit "shuffle". It's not the "correct" way of listening to Bach but for many coders it makes for a highly-productive session.)

These people did not know each other.

So how do you join up a philosopher, a pencil artist, and a composer and get something useful out of it? If you had asked me before I read GEB, I'd say it couldn't be done. More to the point, if you had asked me if it were possible to take a tour of extremely detailed subjects like mathematical meta-systems, recursion, and artificial intelligence at a useful depth while still holding a general audience I would have said it was impossible. Yet this is the book that does it.

There's a good reason this work won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980.and MIT created a course for high school students based entirely on this book. The structure of the book itself is a work of genius. Each section is introduced by a dialog between mythical creatures. It's almost like reading an Aesop's fable before the "real" chapter begins. Sometimes the characters get the idea right, sometimes not, but it's always funny. The structure of the book, where form is separated but intertwined with function is something I've never seen beforeI say.

Fair warning, though, this is deep intellectual water. You need to take your time with the book and be prepared to do some serious thinking. Many readers will not be up to the task. I know it took me three tries, over 20 years of time, to finally make it through. But part of the "fun" of the book is all the great mind-bending experiences you have while digesting it. Sometimes I think people get as much of a kick out of remembering how cool it was to finally understand some of this material as they did from the substance of the book itself!

Hofstadter also uses the creative and fun nature of the structure of the book to gloss over some deep problems in order to maintain artistic and editorial integrity. Or in other words, the flow and style of the book came first, not being exactly correct. To me this was a good call. Some others, probably people a lot smarter than me, might find the deviations very distracting. Meh. I say get over it. If you read this book and gain a big interest in formal systems, philosophy, math, art, and music? Trust me, the little stuff is not that important.

I could go on -- for many pages, probably. It's one of those books where once you read it you'll always be a fan. Great, deep, and useful reading for any hacker. Feed your brain.

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