Sections of the book Edit

Part I: GEB Edit

"Gödel, Escher, Bach"

Part II: EGB Edit

An "Eternal Golden Braid"

About this site Edit

Douglas Hofstadter's award-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, is a journey through surprisingly intertwined ideas from mathematics, art, music, computer science, and philosophy.

This wiki is a place for discussing the book, understanding its context, discovering its hidden tricks, and exploring its unanswered questions.

The wiki was started in December 2014, by members of /r/geb on Reddit. Anyone can begin editing and contributing to the wiki, simply by creating an account.

The shared experience of GEB Edit

Gödel, Escher, Bach has introduced new fields of thought to a generation of self-directed learners. A Nature review called it "an entire humanistic education between the covers of a single book". It's become a fixture in geek culture, even bleeding into popular culture once in a while.

It's a book that encourages you to participate in it. To fully experience it, you don't just read it, you do it by doing the math, listening to the music, participating in the culture surrounding it, and discussing the ideas you come across with other people.

As much as the book is packed full of ideas, the book alone doesn't give you everything you need to get the most out of it. Reading GEB has often been a solitary experience, with readers having to go look up the music, the cultural references, the details of the math, and the ways these fields of knowledge have changed in the decades since it was written.

You could imagine a supplement to GEB that contains everything the book doesn't. A place to find "notes in the margin" written by other people sharing the experience of reading the book. That's what this wiki could be.