Biography
Hofstadter was born in New York City on Feb. 5, 1915, to Louis Hofstadter, a salesman, and the former Henrietta Koenigsberg. He attended elementary and high schools in New York City and entered City College of New York, graduating with a B.S. degree magna cum laude in 1935 at the age of 20, and was awarded the Kenyon Prize in Mathematics and Physics. He also received a Charles A. Coffin Foundation Fellowship from the General Electric Company, which enabled him to attend graduate school at Princeton University, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1938. He did his post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania before joining Stanford University. Hofstadter taught at Stanford University from 1950 to 1985.
In 1942 he married Nancy Givan, a native of Baltimore. They had three children: Laura, Molly - who was disabled and not able to communicate, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter.
Robert Hofstadter's Erdős number is 5.
The character Leonard Hofstadter, featured in the CBS television comedy The Big Bang Theory, is named after Robert Hofstadter.
Read more about this topic: Robert Hofstadter
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