Samuel's review
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
To start let me explain why I didn't give it the highest ranking. This is a case of where I went to college spoiled me. Many of the subjects involved were not new to me, number theory, set theory, and the like I've seen before. This led me to experience GEB more as a review textbook in places.
The dialogues were amusing, an obvert tribute to Lewis Carroll, and how the author leads the reader through the abstract mathematical concepts was done very well. That being said, I think their are other books, better written, that can accomplish the same goal. For one, just looking at a Escher is an experience. If you want to know about Bach, Christopher Wolfe's bio is one of the best composer biographies I've ever read. As for Godel and the Imcompleteness theorems, Nagel & Newman's Godel's Proof is the excellent, classic work and a couple of years ago, Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness came out which takes you through the mathematician's life as well as his most famous contribu...more
The dialogues were amusing, an obvert tribute to Lewis Carroll, and how the author leads the reader through the abstract mathematical concepts was done very well. That being said, I think their are other books, better written, that can accomplish the same goal. For one, just looking at a Escher is an experience. If you want to know about Bach, Christopher Wolfe's bio is one of the best composer biographies I've ever read. As for Godel and the Imcompleteness theorems, Nagel & Newman's Godel's Proof is the excellent, classic work and a couple of years ago, Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness came out which takes you through the mathematician's life as well as his most famous contribu...more
