The Year of Mathemagical Thinking

Just before the epilogue of I Am a Strange Loop, there's a photograph of a sculpture, an in-curving, interlaced metal knot that could almost be a three-dimensional map of one of those recursive, self-referential arguments Hofstadter is so fond of. When I saw it, I was struck not just by how beautiful it was but also by the fact that I'd seen it before: it was made by my sister, who was so deeply inspired by Gödel, Escher, Bach 28 years ago. Purely by chance, it was given to Hofstadter for Christmas one year, and he photographed it and put the picture in his book. I told Hofstadter, who loves this kind of spectacular oddity--it's evidence, maybe, that something of his mental pattern made its way into his writing, then into my sister, on into her art and finally back to its original source, Hofstadter himself, thus closing the circle. "That is hilarious," he says. "It is really a strange loop."