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Hofstadter has not yet attempted the formidable task of following his book Gödel, Escher, Bach (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize) with anything similar. His second book, The Mind's I, is a collection of essays (edited jointly with Daniel Dennett) by various authors with extended commentaries on them by the editors. This present book is also a collection of essays: Hofstadter's own, drawn from his column, ‘Metamagical Themas’ in the New Scientist, which ran from January 1981 to July 1983. ‘Metamagical themas’ is an anagram of ‘mathematical games’, the title of the column written by Martin Gardner, whom he succeeded. By its nature, neither collection achieves the same sustained argument or internal coherence of Gödel, Escher, Bach. There is, however, an underlying theme to this collection, as shown by its sub-subtitle An Interlocked Collection of Literary, Scientific and Artistic Studies. It is the work ‘interlocked’ that gives the clue both to Hofstadter's skill and to his appeal. He looks for, finds, and elucidates basic patterns which underlie such diverse and apparently unconnected phenomena as the essence of a letter of the alphabet, Rubik's Cube, self-replication, self-reference, strange attractors (a mathematical concept), machine-thinking, the evolution of co-operation, the nuclear arms race, the paradox of ‘The Prisoner's Dilemma’, Chopin's music, parqueting a floor, and a wealth of others. It is indeed the wealth of Hofstadter's mind, along with his ability to select the salient points in a complex exposition and to present them with an unerring wit and charm, that make his books best-sellers. He has a playfulness that only rarely palls but which carries the reader along and encourages him to tackle what are often, it must be admitted, quite abstruse mathematical and logical arguments.
Hofstadter's books popularise mathematics and logic in the best tradition. He writes for the non-specialist, but he makes no concessions and, for the most part, his essays a