Douglas Hofstadter, Professor of cognitive science and comparative literature, LGB 1963

Douglas Hofstadter

La Grande Boissière, 1963

Professor of cognitive science and comparative literature

USA

Find more about me:

• University of Indiana website

My year at Ecolint truly revolutionized my life. Having really good friends from other countries just changed everything for me. (...) I have remained friends with most of them for the rest of my life. What could be more profound in any human’s life than to have developed (as a young teenager) lifelong friendships with people from all around the world?

I am still (at age 79) a professor (of cognitive science and comparative literature) at Indiana University in Bloomington. After Ecolint, I majored in math at Stanford (B.S. in 1965), then got a PhD in physics at the University of Oregon (1975), then became a professor at Indiana University (1977–1984), then had a four-year stint as a professor at the U. of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and then in 1988 I returned to Indiana University, where I still am.

My year at Ecolint truly revolutionized my life. Having really good friends from other countries just changed everything for me. My best friends were Iranee de Soysa (from Sri Lanka, then called “Ceylon”), Cyril Erb from Switzerland (from Geneva itself, in fact), Ronald Veitch (from Scotland), Monica Renlund (from Sweden), Peter Payne (from the U.K.), Steven Tobias (from the U.S.), Lucie Arbuthnot (from the U.S. and Geneva) Mohammed Kowsar (from Pakistan), and others. I have remained friends with most of them for the rest of my life. What could be more profound in any human’s life than to have developed (as a young teenager) lifelong friendships with people from all around the world?

I grew passionate about the French language and studied it like mad, and continued to study it like mad after our family returned to California in 1959. I made a huge effort to become truly fluent in French and to have a perfect accent. French was an obsession for me and has remained a passion my entire life. Learning a second language in a deep way was revolutionary for me; it changed everything about my perspective on the world. I came to understand words and communication in ways that would have been unimaginable without that experience. My intimate and long-lasting contact with the French language generalized outwards into a passion for other languages in general. Over my life, I have studied many languages and have reached various levels of mastery of them (but those levels fluctuate enormously over time, since “Use it or lose it” always applies to all languages). In sum, my love for other languages and other cultures is one of the biggest and most important parts of who I am.

Learning a second language in a deep way was revolutionary for me; it changed everything about my perspective on the world. I came to understand words and communication in ways that would have been unimaginable without that experience.

There were no epoch-making events that I recall that year, other than my being swept away with love for my friends, for Ecolint, for the French language, for the tram #12 (and #1 also), and for Geneva as a place to live.

Both my belief in tolerance and my fascination with other cultures were profoundly shaped by being at Ecolint. This was the diametric opposite of the junior high school that I had attended in Palo Alto, California, where there was huge pressure towards conformity and there was no awareness of any other cultures whatsoever. This was many years before Silicon Valley changed the Bay Area, of course.