Metamagical Themas

Douglas R. Hofstadter collects his Scientific American columns from the early 1980s, which ran under a title that is an anagram of Mathematical Games, the Martin Gardner column they first alternated with. The chapters are regrouped into seven sections, each chapter with a post scriptum often drawing on letters from readers, and several pieces never ran in the magazine. Topics range from self-reference and analogy to Robert Axelrod's work on the prisoner's dilemma and the idea of superrationality, with three chapters on the Lisp language, two on Rubik's Cube and two dialogues in the style of Gödel, Escher, Bach. Running through them is the question of how people and machines think. Basic Books published the collection in 1985.

Patrick Collison includes it on his Bookshelf list.