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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

In April 1980 Douglas R. Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.

By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M.C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The book contains many instances of recursion and self-reference and is full of wordplay and puzzles. It’s a very ambitious book that doesn’t succeed on all levels, but Hofstadter’s optimism and his drive to explore the huge amounts of knowledge available in the world make you want to read it again and again.

Erik Kersten Editor

Convex and Concave

Convex and Concave (March 1955) has a nightmarish quality: where is the entrance, are we going up or down, are we inside or outside? The construction in the middle, where two perspectives merge, produces a sensation of dizziness.

Nocturnal Rome: Santa Maria del Popolo

During the first months of 1934 Escher worked on a series of prints of Rome by night. ‘This amazing, beautiful, night-time Rome, whose architecture I love so much more than I do during the day’.

Birds (1926)

In the winter of 1925/1926 Escher worked on a series of six woodcuts about the creation of the world as told in the Book of Genesis, ‘I sei giorni della creazione’. The series gathered a lot of appreciation, both in the Netherlands as in Italy where he exhibited them in…

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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

More Escher today

Convex and Concave

Nocturnal Rome: Santa Maria del Popolo

Birds (1926)