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Amazon.com
"Every family has its black sheep--in ours it was Uncle Petros." The narrator of Apostolos Doxiadis's first novel, Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture, is unable to understand the reasons for his uncle's fall from grace. A kindly, gentle recluse devoted only to gardening and chess, Petros Papachristos exhibits no sign of dissolution or indolence: so why is he held in such low esteem? One day, his brother reveals all:
'Your Uncle Petros cast pearls before swine; he took something holy and sacred and great, and shamelessly defiled it!' ... 'His gift, of course!' ... 'The great, unique gift that God had blessed him with, his phenomenal, unprecedented, mathematical talent! The miserable fool wasted it; he squandered it and threw it out with the garbage. Can you imagine it? The ungrateful bastard never did one day's useful work in mathematics. Never! Nothing! Zero!'Needless to say, such apoplexy only provokes the boy's curiosity, and what he eventually discovers is a story of obsession and frustration, of Uncle Petros's attempts at finding a proof for one of mathematics' great enigmas--Goldbach's Conjecture.
The innumerate may initially find this undramatic material for a novel. Yet Doxiadis offers up a beautifully imagined narrative, which reveals a rarefied world of the intellect that few people will ever enter, in which numbers are entirely animate entities, each possessed of "a distinct personality." Without ever alienating the reader, he demonstrates the enchantments of this art as well as the ambition, envy, and search for glory that permeate its apostles. Balancing the narrator's own awkward move into adulthood with the painful memories of his brilliant relative, Doxiadis shows how seductive the world of numbers can be, and how cruel a mistress. "A mathematician is born, not made," Petros declares--an inheritance that proves both a curse and a gift. --Burhan Tufail --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Publishers Weekly
An ambitious young man's doomed search for truth through mathematics is the theme of this intriguing debut from Greek film director, computer expert and mathematician Doxiadis. The narrator, a young man living with his parents in Athens, describes his fascination with his reclusive Uncle Petros, who is considered a failure by his family. When his nephew shows a zeal for math, Petros offers him a problem that the youth cannot solve even after a summer's work: proof that any even number greater than two is the sum of two primes. The narrator soon learns that this problem, called Goldbach's Conjecture, is more than 200 years old and has remained famously unsolved. Enraged and frustrated, he confronts his uncle, only to discover that Petros has been psychologically crippled by the Conjecture for decades. When he was a young scholar determined to pursue distinction in the world of mathematics, Petros decided to tackle the theorem. But as the proof revealed itself to be impossible, the pursuit became a nightmare in which Petros imagined that numbers had taken human form and were speaking to him. As Petros lost hope of solving the proof, he lost his grip on sanity and his job as a professor at the University of Munich. An obsession with chess replaced Petros's fixation with the theorem, and he settled down into a calmer but far less challenging life. After hearing the story, Petros's nephew goads the now elderly man into renewing the search he dropped years ago--and the results are disastrous. This carefully constructed narrative is occasionally stiff or formal, and the necessary mathematical discussions (including references to G.H. Hardy, Kurt Godel, J.E. Littlewood and Srinivasa Ramanujan) may be over most readers' heads. But Doxiadis keeps the story engaging by focusing on the development of two compelling characters--the fervent nephew and his thorny, driven uncle--and despite its flaws, the novel is captivating. Author tour; rights sold in Greece, Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the U.K. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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