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About the Author: Apostolos Doxiadis

Apostolos Doxiadis (Greek: Απόστολος Δοξιάδης) was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1953, and grew up in Greece.
Although interested in fiction and the arts from his youngest years, a sudden and totally unexpected love affair with mathematics led him to New York's Columbia University at the age of fifteen. He did graduate work in Applied Mathematics at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, working on mathematical models for the nervous system.
After his studies, Apostolos returned to Greece and his adolescent loves of writing, cinema and the theater. For some years he directed professionally for the theater, and in 1983 made his first film Underground Passage (in Greek). His second film, Terirem (1986) won the prize of the International Center for Artistic Cinema (CICAE) at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival.

Since the mid-eighties, most of Apostolos' work has been in fiction. He has published four novels in Greek, Parallel Life (1985), Makavettas (1988), Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (1992) and Three Little Men (1997). His translation of Uncle Petros was published internationally in 2000, to great critical acclaim, and has since been translated into over thirty languages. Apostolos now writes in both Greek and English.

imageview.aspx2Apart from his work in fiction, Apostolos has written two plays. In 1999, he wrote and directed the musical shadow puppet play "The Tragical History of Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionist", accompanied by a volume of texts and images, Paralipomena. In 2006, his play Seventeenth Night had a year-long run in an Athens theatre. The play is a fictional recreation of the last days in the life of the great logician, and father of the incompleteness theorem, Kurt Gödel.

In autumn 2008, Apostolos, completed the graphic novel Logicomix, co-authored with Christos H. Papadimitriou, with art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. The book's story is based on the epic quest for the foundations of mathematics. Logicomix was published in Autumn 2009 by Bloomsbury in the U.S. and the U.K.

Apart from his work in the various modes of storytelling, in the past few years, Apostolos has been studying the relationship between mathematics and narrative. He is currently editing a volume on mathematics and narrative with mathematician Barry Mazur, of Harvard University, due to be published in 2010.

Apostolos lives in Athens with his wife, the novelist Dorina Papaliou, and their children.


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Find the best price forUncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

Goodreads rating: 3.97

Paperback, Published in Mar 2001 by Faber and Faber

ISBN10: 0571205119 | ISBN13: 9780571205110

Page count: 224

Uncle Petros is a family joke. An ageing recluse, he lives alone in a suburb of Athens, playing chess and tending to his garden. If you didn't know better, you'd surely think he was one of life's failures. But his young nephew suspects otherwise. For Uncle Petros, he discovers, was once a celebrated mathematician, brilliant and foolhardy enough to stake everything on solving a problem that had defied all attempts at proof for nearly three centuries - Goldbach's Conjecture.

His quest brings him into contact with some of the century's greatest mathematicians, including the Indian prodigy Ramanujan and the young Alan Turing. But his struggle is lonely and single-minded, and by the end it has apparently destroyed his life. Until that is a final encounter with his nephew opens up to Petros, once more, the deep mysterious beauty of mathematics. Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is an inspiring novel of intellectual adventure, proud genius, the exhilaration of pure mathematics - and the rivalry and antagonism which torment those who pursue impossible goals.

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