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Awesome book. Read it in high school ~1985; so meme-dense I could only absorb about 3 pages at a time ... all 832 pages, with great enthusiasm. Just what I need
by ctdonath 15y ago
Awesome book. Read it in high school ~1985; so meme-dense I could only absorb about 3 pages at a time ... all 832 pages, with great enthusiasm. Just what I needed at a formative time. A geek must-read.
- brudgers 15y agoMy friend, Rich, brought a copy to AP Calc. I was at the Waldenbooks in the mall, that afternoon picking up a copy...later traded it for The Complete Works of Shakespeare at university. Picked up another copy, which I still have, about twenty years ago to fill the obvious hole in my library. It's one of those books that people should be familiar enough with to be able to talk about, even if they haven't read it.
- cgh 15y agoMy experience was similar to yours. I read it when I was 15 or so, a bit at a time. I didn't understand all of it, but I knew that this was something formative and that maybe a computer science degree would be a really good thing to pursue. I've read it several times since. Unfortunately, I've found Hofstadter's other stuff to be less compelling, other than his Scientific American column, which was collected in Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games, the column his replaced).