Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture [Hardcover]

Apostolos Doxiadis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 19, 2000

In the tradition of Fermat's Last Theorem and Einstein's Dreams, a novel about mathematical obsession.

Petros Papachristos devotes the early part of his life trying to prove one of the greatest mathematical challenges of all time: Goldbach's Conjecture, the deceptively simple claim that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes. Against a tableau of famous historical figures-among them G.H. Hardy, the self-taught Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, and a young Kurt Godel-Petros works furiously to prove the notoriously difficult conjecture. Decades later, his ambitious young nephew drives the defeated mathematician back into the hunt to prove Goldbach's Conjecture. . . but at the cost of the old man's sanity, and perhaps even his life.

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (February 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582340676
• ISBN-13: 978-1582340678
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #809,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dare I called a mathematics book "uneven"?, April 16, 2000

By 

David Harris - See all my reviews

This review is from: Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Hardcover)

Uncle Petros is most definitely an interesting read, but I suspect each reader have a markedly different experience with the book. As a fictional story woven neatly into the real history of mathematics, it does very well.

The most impressive part of the book was its representation of a mathematician's life. Although not a mathematician myself (I'm a physicist), I can see a very truthful portrayal of the struggles (and joys) of a life in mathematical research. The human element has often been overlooked in recent popular science/science literature books.

The only negative comment I have regarding the book is the treatment of mathematical content. If you are looking for a book that will give you some insight into the actual nature of Goldbach's conjecture, look elsewhere. The mathematics itself is never treated beyond describing what the problem is and how to understand a statement of it.

That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, however, there are a great number of references to mathematical knowledge that I imagine are beyond the comprehension of people who have not studied mathematics at a university level. If you don't mind being somewhat perplexed by the occasional sentence, then you won't have a problem. Just don't think that the bits you are missing will illuminate the mathematics of Goldbach's conjecture particularly well.

Unfortunately, the case is worse for Godel's incompleteness theorems. If the ideas discussed whet your appetite, you are best off seeking out other popular science books on the topic as Uncle Petros does not give a very clear idea of its nature.

Overall, however, the story is an interesting one. It is one of the few books available which deals with the nature of being a mathematician and for that it is to be commended.

If you like this type of book, I would recommend you have a look at The French Mathematician, by Tom Petsinis, a well written fictional biography of Evariste Galois, another big name in mathematics. It is well written literature and provides real insight into a mathematical life and the mathematics driving it.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An elegy on elusiveness, June 7, 2000

By 

George Baloglou - See all my reviews

This review is from: Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Hardcover)

This "anti-heroic" novel is centered around a man's changing attitudes toward the passion of his life: the man happens to be a Greek mathematician with a distinguished -- for a while -- career in early twentieth century Germany; and his passion is no other than an unsolved problem that even elementary school kids could understand (but not necessarily comprehend): is every even number the sum of just two odd numbers none of which is the product of smaller odd numbers? The Greek mathematician, Petros Papachristou, is fictional, but the problem, known as Goldbach's Conjecture, is very real and still (June 2000) unsolved, perhaps even unsolvable.

This last word, "unsolvable", is indeed the novel's keystone: to most people it means "something that themselves, and possibly others as well, cannot solve", but to mathematicians it may also mean "something that cannot be solved" or, in more mathematical language, "something that cannot be decided"; more to the point, a mathematical problem is "undecidable" when its solution is elusive not because of the potential solvers' insufficient talent, effort or knowledge, but rather because of its "inner structure". Wonderfully, the first and most famous example of such an "undecidable" statement comes straight out of plane geometry and the world's second most read book, Euclid's "Elements": is it true for every straight line L and every point P not on L that there exists exactly one straight line that is parallel to L and passes through P at the same time? [If you think that the answer is an obvious "yes", imagine our universe as a sphere and then start thinking what "straight lines" and "parallel lines" on that sphere ought to be...]

Papachristou's personal tragedy is precisely that he invested so much of himself on a goal that was not only extraordinarily ambitious, but quite likely profoundly unattainable as well: he worked on a mathematical problem that might have been, or even be, undecidable rather than merely unsolvable. Moreover, he started pursuing his goal at a time that it was not clear to him (or anyone else) how plentiful unattainable goals are: indeed it was only in 1930 that Czech mathematician Kurt Goedel (a real person!) stunned the world by proving that every mathematical system and theory (be it built on numbers or lines or whatever) hides deep inside it undecidable questions; that is, Euclid's undecidable "postulate" was far from an isolated "accident" in our intellectual history...

Shattered by Goedel's discovery, Papachristou the brilliantly successful (but increasingly withdrawn) mathematics professor turns into "Uncle Petros": a social oddity living alone on family inheritance in an Athenian suburb, and visited by disapproving relatives every June 29 (his "name day"). But one of those visiting relatives is an angel (or devil?) of sorts, a young, bright nephew with a developing passion for Mathematics, completely unaware of his uncle's complicated past in the field (which is a sad story for the entire family): Uncle Petros feels obliged to discourage him from pursuing Mathematics by employing Goldbach's Conjecture in a sinister manner, and that's where the story begins to unravel...

Skillfully, Doxiadis, himself withdrawn from a potentially brilliant career in mathematics, builds his novel around the parallel mathematical orbits of uncle and nephew and their encounter with the infamous problem. The emphasis is on human struggle and disillusionment rather than the mathematics itself, which, with the exception of Goedel's "philosophical" theorem, is kept on the story's periphery and on an intentionally, some times even naively so, accessible level. Another mathematical prodigy, a Brooklyn Jew mastering the immensely complicated field of Algebraic Topology in the novel's backstage, is cleverly thrown into the story as an unanticipated link between uncle and nephew.

Those familiar with Doxiadis' first novel, "Parallel Lives" (1985, in Greek), may not be surprised by the novel's ending: Uncle Petros is eventually led back to his life's failed passion by his nephew's unforeseen love of mathematics ... in about the same way a random encounter involving a third person brings back to the "Parallel Lives"' old Christian ascetic his own youth's elusive goal (and very reason for his withdrawing into the Arabian desert) -- a beloved, unfaithful, much repented wife ravaged by old age... One story is centered around mathematical truth, the other one around Christian faith, but one thing Doxiadis seems to warn us about in both is that, long after we have shattered and buried the statues of our youth, the broken marbles may one day resurface to adorn our coffin...

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly original!, January 29, 2000

By 

George Tsiros (Athens, Greece) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Hardcover)

To those of you who maybe hesitate reading a book by a relatively new Greek author,I say only this: Order now! "Unkle Petros" is a fascinating human story evolving around advanced mathematics, nevertheless accessible even to people like me who only know that 2+2=4. Doxiadis has written one of the true originals of the year 2000, with knowledge, humour, style and true love for his hero. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!