I was born in midtown Manhattan right as World War Two was drawing to a conclusion. My Dad was a physics prof at an august institution roughly an hour south by train, and until I was two or so, my Dad did “wrong-way” commuting to and from Manhattan. Finally our family found a flat and had a short stint living in that most Ivy of Ivy towns, but around my fifth birthday, my Dad got an alluring invitation to work way out in California, and so my folks, my baby sis Laura, and I all got into our car, took off on a cross-country jaunt, and soon wound up at Stanford. I did most of my growing-up on campus, going to junior high and high school in Palo Alto, and so it was natural that I should go to Stanford (as most of my cohorts did, in fact).

Loving math from childhood, I took as much of it as I could (calculus, groups, topology, and such topics), but I also got into studying Italian, Latin, Spanish, Hindi, bits of Russian and Tamil, and so on — but most of all, I must say, a strong and idiomatic command of français was my goal. (Our family’s Swiss sabbatical, during which I was in “third form” in a British-run school and had many francophonic pals, did a lot toward bringing this about.) Although I found linguistics intriguing from afar, upon actually taking it I found it too formalistic and artificial, but luckily, that did nothing to diminish my captivation with words, sounds, grammars, and symbols, which still had a fantastic magic, to my mind. I was curious about how brains (or minds, if you will!) think, and thus I found symbolic logic fascinating; programming, too, was an important part of my multifarious mind-pursuits.

Though constantly musing about all sorts of things, I wasn’t just a lump on a log — not by a long shot. In fact, I did many sports: running, swimming, skiing, skating, occasional hoop-shooting, and loads of biking. Of all things, though, I’d say music was my most constant companion, day and night — Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and on and on and on, including lots of old jazz.... I wasn’t playing a lot, though — mostly just absorbing from “vinyl” (in today’s lingo), coming to know so many works. As is obvious, I had a romantic soul, but sad to say, I struck out with girls; that was always a puzzling, troubling fact. Looking back, Stanford’s awful ratio was probably mostly at fault. Also, I was a bit young — a nontrivial handicap.

Anyway, my major at Stanford was math and I had no difficulty with it, not only pulling down mostly A’s but also making many original findings of my own — but to my total shock, math grad school (at cross-Bay rival Cal) was a crushing fiasco — not just arid and confining (which it truly was), but also far too abstract for my mind. I had thus hit a tough crossroads. What to do? At this point, I was playing piano a lot, and I thought of music — composing in particular — as a pathway I might follow, but by light of day, that was just too iffy. My only option was to drop out of math and try physics — a daring foray, as I’d found physics horribly difficult, though inspiring, at Stanford. And, in fact, studying physics in grad school (U of O in Duckburg, up north) was no picnic (to put it mildly!). But finally I got my Ph.D., producing a stunning fractal graph that was intriguing to so many physicists that if I sought a faculty slot at this or that top-notch school, I was probably a shoo-in.

Ironically, though, by that point I had truly had it with physics and its monstrous complications; my mind was now busy grappling with minds, brains, souls, computation, AI, and that loopy conundrum of what an “I” is — and my “I” was now busy writing a highly idiosyncratic book which I thought of as my own way of “braiding” that odd batch of far-flung topics into a natural unity. Upon publication, this book, unusual for its flip-flopping back and forth from highly fanciful contrapuntal dialogs to straightforward monographical writings, was a surprisingly big hit. Upon taking up a job at Indiana U. in Bloomington, I did a lot of work in AI, trying to mimic how analogy-making occurs in human thought. Crucial to my philosophy of computationally approximating a mind was that I was always thinking primarily about how humans think — which is to say, fluidly but also fallibly.

At IU, I was truly lucky to bump fortuitously into Carol Ann Brush, an Italian and art-history major doing grad work in librarianship. Carol and I hit it off, and so, at long last — at thirty-six — I had a most happy romantic affair. What a grand turning point!

Soon I got an invitation to go to Michigan — so good that I couldn’t turn it down, actually — and so I sadly forsook Bloomington for Ann Arbor. It was in that unflappably tooting-its-own-horn town, in fact, that Carol and I wound up marrying, and also that our first child, Danny, was born. In a way, I was slowly turning into a Michigan guy, but Indiana was hoping I still had a soft spot for it, and in fact I did. Upon our old school’s making an outstanding job proposal, Carol and I found it most fitting to go back to IU.

My job in Bloomington was so cushy that I had no particular disciplinary affiliation (a fantastic luxury!), and thus could work on many sorts of things, such as translation (a passion), ambigrams (an odd kind of ambiguous calligraphy), math, AI, and so forth. And Monica, our baby girl, was born in Bloomington. Rich days! Carol and I ran a lot, had lunch on occasion in Italian, and, whilst comparing two translations from Russian, got caught up in Pushkin’s magical, rhythmic, rhyming writings. All was going smoothly for our family.

But alas, on our first sabbatical away from IU, in an idyllic spot in Italy, as Christmas was drawing nigh, Carol was struck without any warning by a malignant brain tumor, and in but a day or two was in a coma. Our kids and I lost Carol that awful month. In a flash, Danny (still shy of six) and Monica (just two-and-a-half) and I had to adjust to living without a woman in our midst, without a Mom. It was tragic for Carol, and cataclysmic for our small family, now just a trio.

Post-sabbatical, back in Bloomington, my kids and I didn’t curtail our habit of talking Italian; today, in fact, it is still our standard way of communicating, still part of our daily fabric — and thus a posthumous fashion of honoring Carol. Danny’s now finishing high school and is as tall as I am, and Monica, in ninth, is bright and social. Danny snowboards with gusto and Monica skis with flair. If only Carol could know all this!

As for my own focus nowadays, it is, as always, broad and a bit wild, including translation (I did an Anglicization of Pushkin’s most famous book, a story told wholly in rhyming stanzas), analogy-making, linguistic slips, today’s cool mantra “you guys” and its unconsciously macho halo, math and physics, art and music, writing (occasionally lipogrammatic, if you know what that is), and God knows what all. It’s kind of a crazy quilt, I must admit.

So, I’d say that about sums it up for you. Bye!

©2006 Douglas Hofstadter
and Stanford University Libraries.

(Previously unpublished.)