Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

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… show more.

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… show more.