Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

Book cover of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

Book description

Uncle Petros is a family joke. An ageing recluse, he lives alone in a suburb of Athens, playing chess and tending to his garden. If you didn't know better, you'd surely think he was one of life's failures. But his young nephew suspects otherwise. For Uncle Petros, he discovers, was…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Manil Suri

Author

For me, this book got the closest to the nitty-gritty of why mathematicians like me, whose job is to prove theorems, find this activity so compelling.

It’s always been the long hunt, with all the frustration as well as the occasional success, that I’ve found so addictive. Doxiadis brought out the nuances of such pursuits brilliantly – the wily Uncle Petros tells the narrator to prove a mathematical statement despite knowing it is almost surely false.

Ah, these little tricks that we mathematicians enjoy playing on unsuspecting souls (I’ve been known to do this to my students a couple of…

From Manil's list on to make you fall in love with mathematics.

Sarah Hart

Author

Uncle Petros, whose story is told by his nephew, devotes his entire mathematical career to “Goldbach’s conjecture”, a deceptively simple observation that every even number from 4 upwards is the sum of two prime numbers.

It’s true for every even number we try, but nobody’s been able to prove it will always work. This book does perhaps the best job in fiction of capturing the emotional experience of abstract mathematics research. That feeling of doing battle with problems so hard they can take years to make any progress at all, problems that you could spend your whole life failing to…

From Sarah's list on mathematician characters.