BOY MEETS GIRL, perhaps; girl meets girl or boy, boy; occasionally boy or girl may even find perfect happiness with dog or horse: As a rule, love stories treat relationships among the animate. But “Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture” describes a passion wholly of the mind…
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture is a recent English translation of a 1992 Greek novel. The author — and I’ll say this at the start since, if you’re like me, you’re very reluctant to read a novel about a mathematician written by an author who knows little about mathematics — received a bachelors degree in mathematics at Columbia University and a masters degree in applied mathematics at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris…
It is a matter of some concern over and above the purely literary when a publisher, in whom the present reviewer has to declare an interest, announces that it is prepared to give away a cool $1 million. And all the more so when, in the last financial year, it made a profit of only £256,000, a sum I had thought perfectly respectable until announcement of this damn fool publicity stunt was made…
It is no longer fashionable to boast of innumeracy. Soon mathematicians will be courted at A-list gatherings and encouraged to stun the assembled celebs with their exquisite little problems. This slim novel from a writer previously unknown outside Greece (now translated into 15 languages) offers the non-mathematician of any age…
In a letter to Leonhard Euler, dated 7 June 1742, Christian Goldbach, a not especially eminent mathematician, speculated that every even number greater than 2 was the sum of at least one pair of primes (a prime being an integer divisible solely by itself and 1). Thus 10 = 7+3, 32 = 13+19, 84 = 67+17, ad infinitum. To the great Euler, it probably seemed a trifling puzzle not worth racking his brain over…
One generally doesn’t speak the words “prime numbers” and “seven-figure prizes” in the same breath.
But don’t tell that to the publishers of “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture”, an engaging first novel by Greek author Apostolos Doxiadis. The Story Behind the Math…
One of the most attractive developments of the literature of the Nineties was the rapprochement between the arts and the sciences. A series of humane and graceful texts appeared whose purpose was to convey to an audience with no special scientific or mathematical competence some of the beauty and resonance of those subjects…
Pure maths is so technical that few have dared to use it as vehicle for fiction. Until Apostolos Doxiadis arrives with Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture…
‘I very much enjoyed Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture, and read it through compulsively to the end.’
‘Paints a fascinating picture of how a mathematician could fall into a mental trap by devoting his efforts to a too difficult problem.’