Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

Pas de couverture — Apostolos Doxiadis, Apostolos K. Doxiadēs: Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Paperback, 2001, Faber and Faber)

Livre broché, 224 pages

Langue : English

Publié 5 mars 2001 par Faber and Faber.

ISBN :: 978-0-571-20511-0

(1 critique)

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is a 1992 novel by Greek author Apostolos Doxiadis. It concerns a young man's interaction with his reclusive uncle, who sought to prove that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes, a famous unsolved mathematics problem called Goldbach's Conjecture. This novel discusses mathematical problems and some recent history of mathematics. As a publicity stunt, the publishers (Bloomsbury USA in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in Britain) announced a $1 million prize for anybody who proved Goldbach's Conjecture within two years of the book's publication in 2000. Not surprisingly, given the difficulty of the problem, the prize went unclaimed.The cover picture of the original edition is the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth.

5 éditions

gimley@bookwyrm.social a publié une critique de Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture par Apostolos Doxiadis

Review of "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture" on 'Goodreads'

3 étoiles

To call a novel about mathematics "formulaic" may be a kind of praise, but I mean that the story feels something like a setup to me. To say more would be a spoiler and though mathematics loves a spoiler, novel readers do not. For me, the two most interesting parts, the non-formulaic parts, were the use of beans to prove a number theory hypothesis (was this an original idea?) and the claim that Ramanujan thought Goldbach's conjecture was ultimately false and would fail for a large enough even number. I tried to confirm the latter with Google and failed but I like the idea and hope it's true.

I seem to recall that the continuum hypothesis was in fact proved undecidable; please correct me if I'm wrong. My own favorite unsolved famous problem is proving P unequal to NP and I actually try to do it occasionally. Attempting such problems …

To call a novel about mathematics "formulaic" may be a kind of praise, but I mean that the story feels something like a setup to me. To say more would be a spoiler and though mathematics loves a spoiler, novel readers do not. For me, the two most interesting parts, the non-formulaic parts, were the use of beans to prove a number theory hypothesis (was this an original idea?) and the claim that Ramanujan thought Goldbach's conjecture was ultimately false and would fail for a large enough even number. I tried to confirm the latter with Google and failed but I like the idea and hope it's true.

I seem to recall that the continuum hypothesis was in fact proved undecidable; please correct me if I'm wrong. My own favorite unsolved famous problem is proving P unequal to NP and I actually try to do it occasionally. Attempting such problems teaches one a lot about the nature of mathematics and the psychology of how it feels to try and do what no one has ever done. In my opinion, this is more than I got from this novel which touches on those subjects.

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Modern fiction
Fiction