Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

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.