Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is a 1992 novel by Greek author Apostolos Doxiadis.
It concerns a young man's interaction with his reclusive uncle, who sought to prove that any even number greater than two is the sum of two primes, which is a famous unsolved mathematics problem called Goldbach's Conjecture. This unusual novel discusses mathematical problems and some recent history of mathematics.
As a publicity stunt, the publishers (Bloomsbury USA in the U.S. and Faber and Faber in Britain) announced a $1 million prize for anybody who proved Goldbach's Conjecture within two years of the book's publication in 2000. Not surprisingly, given the difficulty of the problem, the prize went unclaimed.
Famous quotes containing the words uncle and/or conjecture:
“My uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retalliate upon a fly.
Go,—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose ... go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)