21 (from the original O Theios Petros kai i Eikasia tou Golbach)
22 And again: where was this book’s editor?
23 (And it’s just about as subtle w/r/t its thematics, with the narrator repeatedly and sans irony describing his uncle as an “Ideal Romantic Hero” [caps his] and saying stuff like “Think of the biblical Tree of Knowledge or the Prometheus of mythology. People like him have surpassed the common measure; they’ve come to know more than is necessary to man, and for this hubris they have to pay.”)
24 There’s a way more grievous example of this sort of thing involving Kurt Gödel and the plot’s first real crisis. Alan Turing (here a wide-eyed undergrad) accidentally exposes Petros to Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem in 1933, whereupon Petros freaks out because he fears that the Goldbach Conjecture may be one of the F.I. Theorem’s “formally unprovable” propositions. This is so implausible and reductive as to be almost offensive. As Science’s own readership is hereby presumed (q.v. FN9) to more or less know already, Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem is concerned with the abstract possibility of Completeness in axiomatic systems, and the formally unprovable propositions it succeeds in deriving are all very special self-reference-type cases — the mathematical equivalent of the “I am lying” paradox. To believe that the First Incompleteness Theorem could apply to actual number-theoretic problems like the Goldbach Conjecture is so crude and confused that there is no way that a professional mathematician of Petros’s attainments could possibly entertain what the novel says is “the one and only, dizzying, terrifying question that had jumped into his mind the moment he’d heard of Gödel’s result…: what if the Incompleteness Theorem also applied to his problem? What if Goldbach’s Conjecture was unprovable?”
But then it gets even worse. Petros supposedly rushes off to Vienna and looks up Gödel
“a thin young man of average height, with small myopic eyes behind thick glasses
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove Goldbach’s Conjecture,” he told him in a low, intense voice, “and now you’re telling me it may be unprovable?”
Gödel’s pale face was now totally drained of color [sic].
“In theory, yes—”
“Damn theory, man!” Petros’ shout made the heads of the Sacher café’s distinguished clientèle [sic] turn in their direction. “I need to be certain, don’t you understand? I have a right to know whether I’m wasting my life!” He was squeezing his arm so hard that Gödel grimaced in pain….
Gödel was shaking. “I un-understand how you fe-feel, Professor,” he stammered, “but I–I’m afraid that for the time being there is no way to answer yo-your question.”
25 Some of these footnotes are so weird and U.S.-reader inappropriate that it’s worth giving a concrete example, such as let’s say p. 41’s FN to a line about the narrator enrolling in a U.S. college: “According to the American system, a student can go through the first two years of university without being obliged to declare an area of major concentration for his degree or, if he does so, is free to change his mind until the beginning of the Junior (third) year,” the very meaning of which is anyone’s guess.
26 N.B. here that the following main-text ¶ itself is geared to a very-strong-math-background audience; nobody else is going to get the ¶’s references, and this reviewer has neither the space nor the expertise to elucidate them. So feel free to skip it if you do not fit the ¶’s demographic.
27 Interested Science readers can find a discussion of Schnirelmann’s proof in W. Dunham’s Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics (Wiley, 1990) but will probably have to don a miner’s helmet and go all the way back to Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society Series vol. 2 no. 44, 1938 for T. Estermann’s “On Goldbach’s Problem: Proof That Almost All Even Positive Integers Are Sums of Two Primes.”
28 Unless you are yourself a professional mathematician, the best place to find a nonlethal discussion of this proof (which is known in number theory as “Vinogradov’s Theorem”—that’s how famous this guy was) is in Section C of R. K. Guy’s Unsolved Problems in Number Theory (Springer-Verlag, 1994).
29 N.B.: End of audience-background-and-interest-restrictive main-text ¶.
30 You might further recall (from, e.g., Ovid’s Metamorphoses) that this bull ends up begetting on Minos’s queen the Minotaur, a hideous teratoid monster who has to be secreted in a special labyrinth and propitiated with human flesh, and who basically symbolizes the moral rot at the heart of Minos’s reign. That rot is, as Joseph Campbell describes it, a certain kind of alienated selfishness:
The return of the bull should have symbolized Minos’ selfless submission to the functions of his role. By the sacrilege of the refusal of the rite [of sacrifice], however,iceretur the individual cuts himself as a unit off from the larger whole of the community…. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine.”
31 Clearly, Petros’s real “sin” is not “Pride” so much as plain old selfishness, Greed. It’s not clear whether UPGC’s narrator truly fails to grasp this, or whether he is being presented as naive, or whether the whole thing’s just a translation problem.
32 Obvious though it is, Doxiadis appears to fear that his audience won’t get the compact irony here, so he has Hardy then rather sniffily advise Petros “that it might in the future be more profitable for him to stay in closer contact with his scientific colleagues.”
1 (N.B.: from The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition’s definition of “prosaic”: “consisting or characteristic of prose”; “lacking in imagination and spirit, dull.”)
2 (Numerals don’t count as words either, obviously.)
3 N.B. that this sort of problem is endemic to many of the trendy literary forms that identify/congratulate themselves as transgressive. And it’s easy to see why. In regarding formal conventions primarily as “rules” to rebel against, the Professional Transgressor fails to see that conventions often become conventions precisely because of their power and utility, i.e., because of the paradoxical freedoms they permit the artist who understands how to use (not merely “obey”) them.
4 (Imagine offering a gymnast the chance to levitate and hang there unsupported, or an astronaut the prospect of a launch w/o rocket.)
5 Just in case these reasons [as well as the anthology’s real intended audience] are not yet obvious, q.v. the following announcement, variations of which appear in regular font on Best of The P.P.’s editorial page, in bold at the end of Johnson’s Intro, again in bold in an ad for The P.P. after the contributors’ bio-notes, and yet again, in a bold font so big it takes up the whole page, at the very end of the anthology: