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 seeks proof that any even number greater than two is the sum of two primes, a famous unsolved mathematics problem called Goldbach's Conjecture. Unusually for a novel, it includes some mathematical discussion, including references to G. H. Hardy, Kurt Gödel, and Srinivasa Ramanujan.
As a publicity stunt, the publishers (Bloosmbury 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 publication. Not surprisingly, given the difficulty of the problem, the prize went unclaimed.
