Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession by Apostolos Doxiadis

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession



Download Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession




Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession Apostolos Doxiadis
Language: English
Page: 220
Format: djvu
ISBN: 1582341281, 9781582341286
Publisher:

Amazon.com Review

"Every family has its black sheep--in ours it was Uncle Petros." The narrator of Apostolos Doxiadis's first novel, Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture, is unable to understand the reasons for his uncle's fall from grace. A kindly, gentle recluse devoted only to gardening and chess, Petros Papachristos exhibits no sign of dissolution or indolence: so why is he held in such low esteem? One day, his brother reveals all: 'Your Uncle Petros cast pearls before swine; he took something holy and sacred and great, and shamelessly defiled it!' ... 'His gift, of course!' ... 'The great, unique gift that God had blessed him with, his phenomenal, unprecedented, mathematical talent! The miserable fool wasted it; he squandered it and threw it out with the garbage. Can you imagine it? The ungrateful bastard never did one day's useful work in mathematics. Never! Nothing! Zero!' Needless to say, such apoplexy only provokes the boy's curiosity, and what he eventually discovers is a story of obsession and frustration, of Uncle Petros's attempts at finding a proof for one of mathematics' great enigmas--Goldbach's Conjecture.

The innumerate may initially find this undramatic material for a novel. Yet Doxiadis offers up a beautifully imagined narrative, which reveals a rarefied world of the intellect that few people will ever enter, in which numbers are entirely animate entities, each possessed of "a distinct personality." Without ever alienating the reader, he demonstrates the enchantments of this art as well as the ambition, envy, and search for glory that permeate its apostles. Balancing the narrator's own awkward move into adulthood with the painful memories of his brilliant relative, Doxiadis shows how seductive the world of numbers can be, and how cruel a mistress. "A mathematician is born, not made," Petros declares--an inheritance that proves both a curse and a gift. --Burhan Tufail
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Scientific American

Petros Papachristos, born in Athens in 1895, was sent to the University of Berlin after his teachers discovered his enormous talent for mathematics. He earned his doctorate in 1916 and left for England, where he began an intensive collaboration with G. H. Hardy, J. E. Littlewood and Srinivasa Ramanujan, the world's leading number theorists. In 1919 he was appointed professor at the University of Munich. Over the years, he withdrew into almost complete isolation, directing his research to one of the great unsolved problems of his discipline: the Goldbach Conjecture, which states that every even number is the sum of two primes. He lived an uneventful life up to the moment he claimed to have succeeded in his efforts, whereupon he died, leaving a mystery surrounding his proof as perplexing as the one that enshrouds Fermat's Last Theorem.

Petros Papachristos is of course the invention of Apostolos Doxiadis. But the story of his life is enriched with so many authentic details from history in general and from science in particular that one feels tempted to look him up in a biographic dictionary. Doxiadis manages to keep the reader's attention until the tragic end--but don't be misled: he implies that a first-tier mathematician either dies early or goes mad, referring to Cantor, Gödel and Uncle Petros. But this is definitely a biased selection. Gauss, Hilbert and lots of others lived to a ripe old age in complete mental health, and so far Andrew Wiles doesn't show the slightest sign of madness.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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