Product Description

Uncle Petros is a family joke, but his young nephew suspects there is more to this ageing recluse, living alone in a suburb of Athens. He discovers Petros was once a celebrated mathematician, foolhardy enough to stake everything on solving a problem that defied proof for nearly three centuries.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #457009 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Every family has its black sheep--in ours it was Uncle Petros": the narrator of Apostles Doxiadis's novel Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is the mystified nephew of the family's black sheep, 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 signs of dissolution or indolence: so why do his family hold him in such low esteem? One day, his father reveals all:

Your uncle, my son, committed the greatest of sins ... he took something holy and sacred and great, and shamelessly defiled it! 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!

Instead of being warned off, the nephew instead has his curiosity provoked, and what he eventually discovers is a story of obsession and frustration, of Uncle Petros's attempts at finding a proof for one of the great unsolved problems of mathematics--Goldbach's conjecture.

If this might initially seem undramatic material for a novel, readers of Fermat's Last Theorem, Simon Singh's gripping true-life account of Andrew Wiles's search for a proof for another of the great long-standing problems of mathematics, would surely disagree. What Doxiadis gives us is the fictional corollary of Singh's book: a beautifully imagined narrative that is both compelling as a story and highly revealing of a rarefied world of the intellect that few people will ever access. Without ever alienating the reader, he demonstrates the enchantments of mathematics as well as the ambition, envy and search for glory that permeate even this most abstract of pursuits. Balancing the narrator's own awkward move into adulthood with the painful memories of his brilliant uncle, Doxiadis shows how seductive the world of numbers can be, and how cruel a mistress. "Mathematicians are born, not made," Petros declares: an inheritance that proves to be both a curse and a gift.--Burhan Tufail

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Customer Reviews

What is success - and does it ultimately matter?
You've probably gathered from the other reviews that this novel involves mathematics, and specifically Goldbach's Conjecture: that every prime number can be represented as two odd numbers added together - a theory that has yet to be conclusively proven or disproved. Even if this sort of thing usually bores you, it's worth trying this book, because the underlying themes are not so much mathematics as how one spends one's life, what constitutes success or failure, and whether knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake or just a means to an end.

The young Greek narrator is intrigued by his reclusive, despised Uncle Petros. After much prying he discovers that Petros, once a very promising mathematician, has devoted his life to the seemingly impossible task of proving Goldbach's Conjecture, to the exclusion of almost everything and everyone else. Through flashbacks we see how Petros became so fixated, and we follow his nephew's deliberation about whether to pursue mathematics like his uncle.

Dioxiadis writes simply and elegantly, and leaves it to the reader to decide whether Petros is a hero or a fool. A splendid book.

Much More than Maths
It is difficult to imagine a reader more bored by maths than myself, or one more charmed by this novel. Firstly, the mathematics with which "Uncle Petros" is concerned is not the dull grind of calculation that blighted our schooldays, but another, more mystical, study; a quest for the underlying logic of the universe. But the story of Petros and his nephew is much more. It is a clear and lively introduction to some of the intellectual milestones of the 20th Century, a study of the gradations between ambition and obsession, a fable about the way our family stories shape us and how growing up is, in part, a process of continually reshaping these stories for ourselves (and others). To use an analogy I could not have made before reading it, the novel is itself like a great mathematical proof--spare, beautiful, and only simple on the surface.

Greek Tragedy without the Gods:
Or rather, with the gods reborn in psychological terms as our inner motivators and inhibitors.

At its simplest, this is a short, well written, light, detective story. It is a little like Sherlock Holmes, a set of stories read by Uncle Petros, with Mathematics as an environment rather than a subject.

If taken at this level it is an enjoyable read that should have a wide audience.

However, it is a multifaceted novel. For me it has its origins in Ancient Greece, its heart in the theme of 'Pride" (hubris) and is constructed in terms of Greek Tragedy, complete with protagonist (Uncle Petros) / antagonist (unnamed nephew narrator). It has all the intensity and economy needed to make a wonderful opera.

There are many allusions to the myths, philosophy and history of Ancient Greece. Pythagoras, his mathematics (especially his opinion of the number 2 and the Pythagorean idea of rules imposing limits on the unlimited) and his views on beans seem to lie behind a several of the book's images. Plato is specifically referred to and the location of much of the story in Uncle Petros's semi-rural cottage is reminiscent of the original Academy.

Of the myths, Oedipus is central: The solving of the sphinx's riddles (the second riddle, about two sisters, links with Petros's dream), Oedipus being destroyed by 'truth', his apotheosis at Colonus all have parallels in the novel.

There are references to more recent literature and other arts forms: The choice of Isolde (Wagner's Eros driven opera), as the name of Petros's only human love is typical - and Hamlet, complete with ghost, make an appearance too.

All this is treated with a light hand, there to be seen and enjoyed but not essential to understanding (unlike, for example, in TS Eliot!).

Another major facet is an exploration of creativity and originality. Apostolos Doxiadis clearly demonstrates the visual imaging many great thinkers experience (Kekule and the tail-biting snake being a classic example) and reflects contemporary views on dreams and the role of the sub/unconscious.

The book looks at the social and political consequences of original creativity: The tremendous self belief and lack of doubt needed to drive the mind to real creativity; the politics surrounding the individual in institutions and the need for peer recognition; the isolation from the family and the way we define "self".

Scattered through the book are characters driven 'mad' by too close a knowledge of the pure form - the sad image of Kurt Godel in the 'shabby', 'genteel', Oppenheimer created Institute of Advanced Study is quite horrifying in some respects. Other real mathematicians appear, all 'The Greats' bent from the norms of the society they lived in in some way, all seeking immortality, a place in the museum of mathematics.

The book opens with the bold claim (in a quote) that mathematicians have a greater chance of immortality than poets...