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Amazon.co.uk Review
Your uncle, my son, committed the greatest of sins ... he took something holy and sacred and great, and shamelessly defiled it! 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!Instead of being warned off, the nephew instead has his curiosity provoked, and what he eventually discovers is a story of obsession and frustration, of Uncle Petros's attempts at finding a proof for one of the great unsolved problems of mathematics--Goldbach's conjecture.
If this might initially seem undramatic material for a novel, readers of Fermat's Last Theorem, Simon Singh's gripping true-life account of Andrew Wiles's search for a proof for another of the great long-standing problems of mathematics, would surely disagree. What Doxiadis gives us is the fictional corollary of Singh's book: a beautifully imagined narrative that is both compelling as a story and highly revealing of a rarefied world of the intellect that few people will ever access. Without ever alienating the reader, he demonstrates the enchantments of mathematics as well as the ambition, envy and search for glory that permeate even this most abstract of pursuits. Balancing the narrator's own awkward move into adulthood with the painful memories of his brilliant uncle, Doxiadis shows how seductive the world of numbers can be, and how cruel a mistress. "Mathematicians are born, not made," Petros declares: an inheritance that proves to be both a curse and a gift.--Burhan Tufail --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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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.
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Customer Reviews
I just finished the book. I read the entire book in one sitting. It is without doubt the finest book I have ever read. I will not ramble on with the details of the plot, all I have to say is just "Buy it!". While browsing customer reviews you always see books said to be "Amazing","Fabulous" and similar adjectives but once you buy it you just think "Good". This is not the case. This is a totally honest review (I don't know if it is objective though; I liked to book far too much to be objective) and the book is, as far as I am allowed to judge a book, fantastic.
I am not a mathematician but have read similar books, like "Fermat's Last Theorem", most of which I found rather fascinating, but this book is better than all of them. If you have an interest in mathematics and/or remotely liked the aforementioned (or similar) title, you absolutely *must* buy this book.
I can't really say how I would have reacted to this book if I hated Mathematics. It is by no means a technical book in the sense that if you *hate* mathematics, you won't have to put up with it. I guess that you will definitely find the book "very good", but I cannot really guarantee that it will become your favourite book - maybe, I simply don't know.
Amazon. It's a competent and well-crafted novella and an enjoyable enough read but
if... Read more
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