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In a little gem of a novel, Doxiadis spins a tale of Uncle Petros, an unknown mathematician of genius, who devotes his life to the most famous unsolved problem in Western mathematics. Told in a beautifully spare style from the
retrospective viewpoint of a nephew who had aspired to be a mathematician just like his uncle, a black sheep in the family, we encounter the fascinating culture, accurately limned, of world-class mathematics in the twentieth-century. We meet the Cambridge mathematical superstars, G.H. Hardy and J.E. Littlewood, their colleague, the legendary number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan and, across the water, the fabulous eccentricity of Kurt Goedel and the denizens of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
And, of course, we are treated to a charming encounter with Christian Goldbach's famous conjecture of 1742. In the words of epitaph on Uncle Petros's grave:
Along the way we find ourselves engaged with the anxieties and passions of the lives of our mathematical brothers and sisters from Goedel's terrifying incompleteness theorem to the pathological competitive stress endemic to professional mathematics. Doxiadis knows whereof he speaks and, like Primo Levi with industrial chemistry, has created literature from the materials of a marginalized corner of human experience.
Doxiadis has written a poignant meditation on the pain of human failure in the face of an impossible task. But there is another level to his story as well. I believe that Doxiadis's own youthful involvement with mathematics has informed his imagination in a way that makes him move beyond a spare appreciation of the pain of human hubris. At another level he succeeds, in the way he ends his tale, in evoking in us the feeling of what it is like to be seduced by the tension and excitement of a complex mathematical problem. We get a glimpse, perhaps the very glimpse that Doxiadis himself might have had, of a possible way to pro