> Metamagical Themes
It's Metamagica Themas, I think - an anagram of 'Mathematical Games'; the Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American which proceeded it.
A lovely book.
I was briefly very confused until I figured out you were correcting Themes to Themas, and the dropped "l" was just an accident!
If you were only briefly confused, I congratulate you - it would have confused the heck out of me for much longer.
> Metamagica Themas
Metamagical Themas
(You left out the L.)
Metamagical Thomas
This parallels its influence on me as well. In particular FCaCA has been a good source to learn how to narrow down problems so they can be tackled without diluting the original essence of the problem. Masterful treatment in my opinion.
I still think Hofstadter's "old school AI" thought processes warrant more attention in today's DL frenzy than they get. His books have been a great source of very interesting questions including style transfer (he dealt with fonts in "Letter Spirit"). It was also the inspiration behind some early experiments using n-nets [1] (shameless plug)
For anyone scratching their head, FCaCA is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_An...
This makes sense. I read the book at age of 20 or so, and it made me to change my life and change my career path. It's very playful, it informs, connects and educates. I think older and more cynical me might not have enjoyed it so much.
I think "Metamagical Themes" and the "Fluid concepts and analogies" are his best books although GEP had the largest impact on me. They are more refined explorations of ideas.
The value of Hofstader's life work is his single minded exploration of one of the hardest problems in cognitive science. Unlike conventional AI/ML research he is tackling the problem beyond the reach of the state of the art and refusing to pick easier problems to solve even when he can't make progress.
Hofstader's main proposition is that analogy making is the core of human cognition. He has made repeated attempts to pin it down into something that is formal using toy examples and programs (copycat, letter spirit). I think his approach has been very insightful even if nothing comes out of it.
In my opinion the "Fluid concepts and analogies" is the culmination of his work. GEB and "Metamagical Themeas" are the predule, what came afterwards is more like prose and and maybe reflection of his personal tragedy.