Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar known for his contributions to cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature. His research explores profound concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, and discovery in mathematics and physics.

His highly acclaimed book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, published in 1979, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. Another notable work, I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007, was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

Douglas Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. He grew up on the Stanford University campus, where his father was a professor. Hofstadter attended the International School of Geneva and graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965. He also spent several years in Sweden during the mid-1960s and later earned his Ph.D. in Physics.