Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 once a celebrated mathematician, brilliant and foolhardy enough to stake everything on solving a problem that had defied all attempts at proof for nearly three centuries - Goldbach's Conjecture.

His quest brings him into contact with some of the century's greatest mathematicians, including the Indian prodigy Ramanujan and the young Alan Turing. But his struggle is lonely and single-minded, and by the end it has apparently destroyed his life. Until that is a final encounter with his nephew opens up to Petros, once more, the deep mysterious beauty of mathematics. Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is an inspiring novel of intellectual adventure, proud genius, the exhilaration of pure mathematics - and the rivalry and antagonism which torment those who pursue impossible goals.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

This delightful and original diversion portrays an uncle-nephew relationship built on number theory. The narrator-nephew recalls his teenage curiosity with his eccentric uncle, scorned by the family as a failure. Gingerly gaining Uncle Petros' attention, whom he discovers was a mathematician, the nephew expresses interest in the career. Uncle Petros, of an "antagonistic nature," demands the nephew pass a test: prove that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes--or don't become a mathematician. Failing to prove it, the nephew decamps from Greece for America, whereupon his university roommate exposes Uncle Petros' manipulation: the test, the Goldbach Conjecture, was the very problem Petros had futilely labored over for years. Enraged, the nephew storms back to Greece; the confrontation elicits Uncle Petros' life story, replete with encounters with great mathematicians (such as G. H. Hardy and Kurt Godel), insights into math obsessions, and the rationalizations people make for mean acts. Although framed by math, the Uncle Petros story easily extends interest beyond the science minded. --Gilbert Taylor

Kirkus Book Review

An intellectual thriller that manages to convey the high drama and excitement involved in the pursuit of an answer to a mysterious . . . mathematical theorem. Eccentric uncles are usually better loved than conventional ones, for some reason, and the narrator's uncle Petros Papachristos is about as loopy as they come. Apparently unemployed and rumored to be insane, Uncle Petros lives alone in the countryside and seems to do nothing other than read and play chess. The eldest of the three Papachristos brothers, he grew up in comfort as the son of a successful Athens businessman and was sent for his early education to a fashionable French Jesuit school, where his gift for mathematics was so prodigious that his teachers had to concede their teenaged charge knew more than they. He was then dispatched to Berlin for higher studies, and eventually was on the faculty of the University of Munich. There Uncle Petros became intrigued by Goldbach's Conjecture'which speculates that every even number greater than two may be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers'and sets himself to the task of proving it. By the time he comes to the conclusion that the conjecture is unprovable, he's spent so many years on the effort that his career has been wasted. What effect does his example have on his nephew? Why, naturally it inspires him to become a mathematician and prove the conjecture himself! Some people never learn. Neither do some families. And some end up learning very different things than they set out to discover, as Uncle Petros found out about mathematics and his nephew found out about Uncle Petros himself. Delightful fun, well-conceived and nicely executed.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Apostolos Doxiadis was born in Australia in 1953 and grew up in Athens. He was admitted to New York's Columbia University at the age of fifteen after submitting an original paper to the Department of Mathematics, and did postgraduate work at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.Apart from writing, Doxiadis has made films, winning the International Center for Artistic Cinemas (CICAE) prize at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival for his second feature film, Terirem,. He has directed for the theatre, and his translations include Hamlet and Mourning Becomes Electra.His other novels are A Parallel Life (1985), Macabetas (1988) and The Three Little Men (1997).