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 every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes, a famous unsolved mathematics problem called Goldbach's Conjecture. This 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.[1][2]
The cover picture of the original edition is the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) by Charles Demuth.
References
Book Review in Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Mathworld article on Goldbach's Conjecture, which mentions the unclaimed prize
Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics
Graduate Studies in Mathematics
Hellenica World - Scientific Library
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/"
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
