Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis

Author:Apostolos Doxiadis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608196449
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

At this point in his narrative my uncle stopped. He had been talking for several hours. It was getting dark and the birdsong in the orchard had been gradually tapering off, a solitary cricket now rhythmically piercing the silence. Uncle Petros got up and moved with tired steps to turn on a lamp, a naked bulb that cast a weak light where we were seated. As he walked back towards me, moving slowly in and out of pale yellow light and violet darkness, he looked almost like a ghost.

‘So that’s the explanation,’ I murmured, as he sat down.

‘What explanation?’ he asked absently.

I told him of Sammy Epstein and his failure to find any mention of the name Petros Papachristos in the bibliographical index for Number Theory, with the exception of the early joint publications with Hardy and Littlewood on the Riemann Zeta Function. I repeated the ‘burnout theory’ suggested to my friend by the ‘distinguished professor’ at our university: that his supposed occupation with Goldbach’s Conjecture had been a fabrication to disguise his inactivity.

Uncle Petros laughed bitterly.

‘Oh no! It was true enough, most favoured of nephews! You can tell your friend and his “distinguished professor” that I did indeed work on trying to prove Goldbach’s Conjecture — and how and for how long! Yes, and I did get intermediate results — wonderful, important results — but I didn’t publish them when I should have done and others got in there ahead of me. Unfortunately, in mathematics there’s no silver medal. The first to announce and publish gets all the glory. There’s nothing left for anyone else.’ He paused. ‘As the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and I, while pursuing the two, lost the one…’

Somehow I didn’t think the resigned serenity with which he stated this conclusion was sincere.

‘But, Uncle Petros,’ I asked him, ‘weren’t you horribly upset when you heard from Hardy?’

‘Naturally I was — and “horribly” is exactly the word. I was desperate; I was overcome with anger and frustration and grief; I even briefly contemplated suicide. That was back then, however, another time, another self. Now, assessing my life in retrospect, I don’t regret anything I did, or did not do.’

‘You don’t? You mean you don’t regret the opportunity you missed to become famous, to be acknowledged as a great mathematician?’

He lifted a warning finger. ‘A very good mathematician perhaps, but not a great one! I had discovered two good theorems, that’s all.’

‘That’s no mean achievement, surely!’

Uncle Petros shook his head. ‘Success in life is to be measured by the goals you’ve set yourself. There are tens of thousands of new theorems published every year the world over, but no more than a handful per century that make history!’

‘Still, Uncle, you yourself say your theorems were important.’

‘Look at the young man,’ he countered, ‘the Austrian who published my — as I still think of it — Partitions Theorem before me: was he raised with this result to the pedestal of

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