Right now, reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. The book came out in 1979, just when I went to university for the second time and all the intellectual types seemed to have a copy to carry around the streets. Don't know how many of them actually read it though.
However, I love Escher' paradoxical artworks and the book seeks to draw connections between those, Bach's musical fugues and Gödel's incompleteness theorem - mathematics which I stumbled across during work developing formally provable secure computing systems for handling sensitive data.
I said stumbled across and it has to be said complex mathematical constructs are uhm, not something I find second nature, so to speak. But Hofstadter promises that deep mathematical understanding is not required so we shall see . . .
Only a little way into the book and so far it looks like Hofstadter intends to have fun playing with fairly abstract ideas. I'll read along as long as I'm still having fun too.
However, I love Escher' paradoxical artworks and the book seeks to draw connections between those, Bach's musical fugues and Gödel's incompleteness theorem - mathematics which I stumbled across during work developing formally provable secure computing systems for handling sensitive data.
I said stumbled across and it has to be said complex mathematical constructs are uhm, not something I find second nature, so to speak. But Hofstadter promises that deep mathematical understanding is not required so we shall see . . .
Only a little way into the book and so far it looks like Hofstadter intends to have fun playing with fairly abstract ideas. I'll read along as long as I'm still having fun too.