Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession

Apostolos Doxiadis

Bloomsbury USA | 2001 | 220 páginas | DJVU  | 2,81 Mb

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In the tradition of Fermat's Last Theorem and Einstein'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.