So Knuth wrote up treatise as a dialog between students. (I havent read it.) Hofstader uses mathe-philosophical dialogs in Goedel Escher and Bach. The Greek philosophers like Plato and Zeno often used such dialogs. Then too Hofstader wrote his book in 1976 as a postdoc at Stanford, two years after Stanford prof Knuth published his Surreal book. Maybe there is an influence.