Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture
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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, including references to G. H. Hardy, Kurt Gödel, and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The author gives Gödel's incompleteness theorem the probablity of the conjecture to be unprovable, which is based on the misunderstanding of Gödel's result. In fact, Gödel's belief was that every mathematical proposition was decidable.
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.