Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

by Doxiadis, Apostolos

• ISBN13: 9781582340678
• ISBN10: 1582340676
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-02-19
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

In the tradition ofFermat's Last TheoremandEinstein's Dreams, a novel about mathematical obsession. Petros Papachristos devotes the early part of his life trying to prove one of the greatest mathematical challenges of all time: Goldbach's Conjecture, the deceptively simple claim that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes. Against a tableau of famous historical figures-among them G.H. Hardy, the self-taught Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, and a young Kurt Godel-Petros works furiously to prove the notoriously difficult conjecture. Decades later, his ambitious young nephew drives the defeated mathematician back into the hunt to prove Goldbach's Conjecture. . . but at the cost of the old man's sanity, and perhaps even his life.

Author Biography

Apostolos Doxiadis received a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics from Columbia University in New York and a Master's Degree in Applied Mathematics from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He lives in Athens, Greece.