The Hofstadter Memorial Lecture

Monday, February 28, 2000; 8:00 PM

Regional Teaching Facility (RTF), 370 Serra Mall, TCSEQ, Room 201, Stanford University

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce this year's Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lectures, to be held on February 28 and 29, 2000. This year's invited speaker is Professor Douglas Hofstadter, Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, Indiana University. Professor Hofstadter is the son of the late Nobel Laureate and Stanford Physics Professor, Robert Hofstadter, for whom the lectures are named. Douglas is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his book, G–del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. He also has an unusually wide range of interests and a diverse background in science, most notably his twenty year involvement in computer modeling of analogy-making and creativity. We are very pleased that he will be presenting this year's lectures.

The public lecture, entitled "Musings and Reminiscences of an Ex-Quasi-Physicist," will be an autobiographical talk describing the speaker's arduous journey from mathematics to physics to cognitive science.

The afternoon colloquium will be held on Tuesday, February 29, 2000 at 4:15 PM in the same location. The colloquium is entitled,"The Ubiquity and Power of Analogies in Physics," and will focus on how a familiar idea in one area of physics can be transported into another area and yield important new insights.

Please call 650-723-4347 for more information.

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