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Title: GEB
Date: 26-02-2021
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Towards the end of December I was in the city center for Christmas shopping. At
one point I found myself in a historical bookshop named "Libreria
Internazionale Luxemburg" established in 1872. This is by far the best
bookstore I have the chance to visit - if one day you will be in Turin I
strongly suggest you to go there.
That day I bought a book that I only finished today: Gödel, Escher, Bach by 
Douglas R. Hofstadter (the son of the famous Nobel prize). The term "book" is 
definitely limiting. These pages turned out to be a complex work that embraces
extremely profound topics such as formal systems, music, art, consciousness 
and A.I. The author introduces each chapter with a dialogue between Achilles 
and the Turtle (citing Zenone and Lewis Carroll) in which the main theme of 
the chapter is presented. The whole book follows a specific didactic path 
proposed by Hofstadter: the first 200 pages lay the foundations of formal
systems (introducing a simplified form of Peano's mathematics), then the
limitation theorems are discussed and finally a perspective on artificial
intelligence and its possibilities is presented.
The book is quite heavy (+800 pages) and not so easy to read - especially when
dealing with math topics such us Gödel's incompleteness theorem. However it
remains a popular book for which even the most complex topics are treated in a
discursive way.
Do yourself a favour: dive into this journey and swim to the end. 

I have collected some feedback on bboard and I think I'll start writing a few
lines about some scientific topics - as I originally proposed. I still have no
idea when I'll publish the first one.

Advice and feedback are welcome! 
Email me at davidemitoli[AT]sdf[DOT]org