How much of the book is “good”?
But GEB exposed me to a level of math that seemed to beyond puzzles and applications. Or maybe it was just his engaging style. Or my cool big brother. Regardless, I started college as a math major.
Other things happened since then, and I now have a physics degree, but still enjoy math as an end unto itself.
With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times, it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)
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In case there are other Hofstadter letterform fans here, last year I tracked down the "gridfonts" repository his research group had put together as part of their work on "letter spirit" last millennium, at https://wayback.archive-it.org/219/20060606215909/http://www.... There were 287 gridfonts in it. I reverse-engineered the file format (before finding the Scheme code that decoded it), hacked together a Python 3 script http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gridfontparse.py to convert it to PostScript, and produced this PDF with all the gridfonts: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/all-gridfonts.pdf
I think I may have been the first person to see some of these fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more. I have a vague memory that maybe they were lost in a disk crash.
Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in question was initially published, but outline font files are because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has ever litigated over letterforms like these:
font : benzene right
creator : doug
create date : Tue Feb 19 15:39:48 EST 1991
last edit : feb 24 94
a 058002400B0000
b 04824B00090000
c 04800100090000
That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I think the risk is fairly small.
FWIW, "Angels and Demons" bestseller thriller (?) has a few ambigram puzzles that the protagonist Robert Langdon solves to get to the mystery of the Rosslyn chapel (my memory may be fading here)
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Thanks for this set of amazing fonts! They look amazing. Very glyph-y. And they tickle my inner geek.
The artist made such an impression to the book author, Dan Brown, that he (Brown) decided to name the protagonist after him.
Here's John Langdon, artist: https://www.johnlangdon.net/
Having met John (I showed him the second largest Escher collection), I can confirm he's a wonderful person.
Now I still make them occasionally, though I haven't updated the blog for a while.
I find that tangible art could sometimes say "thank you" more than the utterance of the words themselves.
Also makes for a great wedding gift:
I too love the art of creating an ambigram and my favourite one I've created is one that reads PUSH from one side of a glass door and PULL from the other. Here it is: https://www.instagram.com/p/DH6W36voMe-/
Another textual constraint challenge I found similarly satisfying with Hofstadter's "repeated savoring of unanticipated small pieces of visual magic", was one I set myself as a teen to create the word CTRL (my graffiti tag) out of two components for each letter, but the same two components for every letter. I managed to dig out an image of it: https://gist.github.com/OisinMoran/0ca8dbdfea83d2250e723a034...
dang•4mo ago
Ambigr.am - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45478780 - Oct 2025 (40 comments)