Turns out my advisor Sidney Nagel & Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, Bach, knew each other as kids. Sid is the son of Ernest Nagel, the famous philosopher of science, who was friends with Robert Hofstadter, physics Nobelist and father of Douglas. Greg Huber, a former post-doc here whom I knew, & who also works on soap, had Douglas Hofstadter as an advisor & was involved in the invention of the ambigram.

Which is just to say what a small tribe we in the sciences are.