Apostolos Doxiadis - Uncle Petros and Goldbach

'Sign,’ he repeated unmoved. 'A deal is a deal!'

I left his extended hand holding the fountain pen suspended in mid-air, got out my ballpoint and jabbed in my signature. Before he had time to say anything more I threw the paper at him and made a wild rush to the gate.

'Wait!' he shouted, but I was already outside.

I ran and ran and ran until I was safely out of his hearing and then I stopped and, still breathless, broke down and cried like a baby, tears of anger and frustration and humiliation streaming down my face.

I neither saw nor spoke to Uncle Petros during my last year of school, and in the following June I made up an excuse to my father and stayed home during the traditional family visit to Ekali.

My experience of the previous summer had had the exact result that Uncle Petros had, doubtless, intended and foreseen. Irrespective of any obligation to keep my part of our 'deal', I had lost all desire to become a mathematician. Luckily, the side effects of my failure were not extreme, my rejection was not total and my superior performance at school continued. As a consequence, I was admitted to one of the best universities in the United States. Upon registration I declared a major in Economics, a choice I abided by till my Junior year [2]. Apart from the basic requirements, Elementary Calculus and Linear Algebra (incidentally, I got As in both), I took no other mathematics courses in my first two years.

Uncle Petros' successful (at first, anyway) ploy had been based on the application of the absolute determinism of mathematics to my life. He had taken a risk, of course, but it was a well-calculated one: the possibility of my discovering the identity of the problem he had assigned me in the course of elementary university mathematics was minimal. The field to which it belongs is Number Theory, only taught in electives aimed at mathematics majors. Therefore it was reasonable for him to assume that, as long as I kept my pledge, I would complete my university studies (and conceivably my life) without learning the truth.

Reality, however, is not as dependable as mathematics, and things turned out differently.

On the first day of my Junior year I was informed that Fate (for who else can arrange coincidences such as this?) had assigned that I share my dormitory room with Sammy Epstein, a slightly built boy from Brooklyn renowned among undergraduates as a phenomenal maths prodigy. Sammy would be getting his degree that same year at the age of seventeen and, although he was nominally still an undergraduate, all his classes were already at advanced graduate level. In fact, he had already started work on his doctoral dissertation in Algebraic Topology.

Convinced as I was until that point that the wounds of my short traumatic history as a mathematics hopeful had more or less healed, I was delighted, even amused, when I learned the identity of my new room-mate. As we were dining side by side in the university dining hall on our first evening, to get better acquainted, I said to him casually:

'Since you're a mathematical genius, Sammy, I'm sure you can easily prove that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes.'

He burst out laughing. 'If I could prove that, man, I wouldn't be here eating with you; I'd be a professor already. Maybe I'd even have my Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of Mathematics!'

Even as he was speaking, in a flash of revelation, I guessed the awful truth. Sammy confirmed it with his next words:

'The statement you just made is Goldbach's Conjecture, one of the most notoriously difficult unsolved problems in the whole of mathematics!'

My reactions went through the phases referred to (if I accurately remember what I learned in my elementary college Psychology course) as the Four Stages of Mourning: Denial, Anger, Depression and Acceptance.

Of these, the first was the most short-lived. 'It… it can't be!' I stammered as soon as Sammy had uttered the horrible words, hoping I'd misheard.

'What do you mean "it can't be"?' he asked. 'It can and it is! Goldbach's Conjecture – that's the name of the hypothesis, for it is only a hypothesis, since it's never been proved – is that all evens are the sum of two primes. It was first stated by a mathematician named Goldbach in a letter to Euler [3]. Although it's been tested and found to be true up to enormous even numbers, no one has managed to find a general proof.'

I didn't hear Sammy's next words, for I had already passed into the stage of Anger:

'The old bastard!' I yelled in Greek. "The son of a bitch! God damn him! May he rot in hell!'

My new room-mate, totally bewildered that a hypothesis in Number Theory could provoke such an outburst of violent Mediterranean passion, pleaded with me to tell him what was going on. I, however, was in no state for explanations.

I was nineteen and until then had led a protected life. Except for the single Scotch drunk with Father to celebrate, 'among grown-up men', my graduation from high school and the required sip of wine to toast a relative's wedding, I had never tasted alcohol. Consequently, the great quantities I put down that night at a bar near the university (I started out with beer, moved on to bourbon and ended up with rum) must be multiplied by a rather large n to fully realize their effect.

While on my third or fourth glass of beer and still in moderate possession of my senses, I wrote to Uncle Petros. Later, once into the phase of fatalistic certainty as to my imminent death, and before I passed out, I handed over the letter to the barman with his address and what remained of my monthly allowance, asking him to fulfil my last wish and mail it. The partial amnesia that cloaks the events of that night has obscured for ever the detailed content of the letter. (I did not have the emotional stamina to seek it out from among my uncle's papers, when many years later I inherited his archive.) From the little that I remember, however, there can be no swear-word, vulgarity, insult, condemnation and curse that it didn't contain. The gist of it was that he had destroyed my life and as a consequence upon my return to Greece I would murder him, but this only after torturing him in the most perverse ways human imagination could contrive.

I don't know how long I remained unconscious, struggling with outlandish nightmares. It must have been late afternoon of the following day before I began to be aware of my surroundings. I was in my bed in the dormitory and Sammy was there, at his desk, bent over his books. I groaned. He came over and explained:

I had been brought back by some fellow students who'd found me dead to the world on the lawn in front of the library. They'd hauled me to the infirmary, where the doctor on duty had had no difficulty diagnosing my condition. As a matter of fact, he didn't even have to examine me, as my clothes were covered in vomit and I reeked of alcohol.

My new room-mate, obviously concerned about the future of our cohabitation, asked me whether this sort of thing occurred frequently with me. Humiliated, I mumbled that it was the first time.

'It's all because of Goldbach's Conjecture,' I whispered, and sank back into sleep.

It took me two days to recover from an excruciating headache. After that (it seems the torrent of alcohol had carried me right through Rage) I entered the next stage of my mourning: Depression. For two days and nights I stayed slumped in an armchair in the common room on our floor, listlessly observing the black-and-white images dancing on the TV screen.

It was Sammy who helped me out of this self-inflicted lethargy, displaying a sense of camaraderie totally inconsistent with the caricature of the self-centred, absent-minded mathematician. On the evening of the third day after my bender I saw him standing there, looking down at me.

'Do you know tomorrow is the deadline for registration?' he asked severely.