Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

A Novel of Mathematical Obsession

Paperback, 220 pages

English language

Published Feb. 3, 2001 by Bloomsbury USA.

ISBN:
978-1-58234-128-6
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OCLC Number:
45785335

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4 stars (7 reviews)

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is a 1992 novel by Greek author Apostolos Doxiadis. It concerns a young man's interaction with his reclusive uncle, who sought to prove that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes, a famous unsolved mathematics problem called Goldbach's Conjecture. This novel discusses mathematical problems and some recent history of mathematics. As a publicity stunt, the publishers (Bloomsbury USA in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in Britain) announced a $1 million prize for anybody who proved Goldbach's Conjecture within two years of the book's publication in 2000. Not surprisingly, given the difficulty of the problem, the prize went unclaimed.The cover picture of the original edition is the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth.

4 editions

Review of "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture" on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

To call a novel about mathematics "formulaic" may be a kind of praise, but I mean that the story feels something like a setup to me. To say more would be a spoiler and though mathematics loves a spoiler, novel readers do not. For me, the two most interesting parts, the non-formulaic parts, were the use of beans to prove a number theory hypothesis (was this an original idea?) and the claim that Ramanujan thought Goldbach's conjecture was ultimately false and would fail for a large enough even number. I tried to confirm the latter with Google and failed but I like the idea and hope it's true.

I seem to recall that the continuum hypothesis was in fact proved undecidable; please correct me if I'm wrong. My own favorite unsolved famous problem is proving P unequal to NP and I actually try to do it occasionally. Attempting such problems …

Review of "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book tells of Uncle Petros' lifelong search for the proof of Goldbach's Conjecture - "Every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers". The beauty of the book lies in the author's ability to make this journey thrilling, and even edge-of-the-seat at times.

If I have one complaint, it's that the lives of the real mathematicians that we meet in this book were even more enthralling than presented. The book talks about death, insanity and tragedy in mathematics - a result of "getting too close to the Truth" - but doesn't make the case as strong as it could have.

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Subjects

  • Mystery & Detective - General
  • Fiction - General
  • Fiction
  • General
  • Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General