Uncle Petros and Goldbach's conjecture. Translated from the 1992 Greek original (Q2716316)

This fascinating novel describes the relations between a highly gifted mathematician, Uncle Petros, and his nephew. Uncle Petros had been highly successful as a mathematician, with a doctoral dissertation written under Constantin Caratheodory, at the time still in Berlin. This gained him a professorship at Munich, and access to numerous colleagues; especially, when he had turned his attention to number theory, and especially Goldbach' s Conjecture, he spent time in Cambridge, England, with Hardy and Littlewood and Ramanujan. However, his obsession, as it was to become, with trying to prove Goldbach's Conjecture, made him a recluse, and when eventually he tried to publish two intermediate results he had obtained years earlier, Hardy informed him that both results had just been obtained and published by others. On a later visit to Cambridge to consult Hardy, Uncle Petros is asked by an undergraduate, Alan Turing, to help him read a paper in German, and this is no other than Gödel's famous first paper. Uncle Petros then visits Gödel in Vienna, and after years of finding no proof of the Conjecture, excuses his lack of success by guessing the Conjecture is unprovable. He retires to his native Greece, where the nephew, who writes in the first person and has abandoned the study of mathematics for business studies and entered the parental firm, quizzes him and eventually, possibly, drives his uncle mad and, possibly, causes his death. There are a number of intentionally unanswered questions.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe book is full of wonderful psychology, and what little mathematics occurs is elementary and lucidly explained; thus the book could easily be read by non-mathematicians [and some, who have read it, have praised it highly].