'No,I don't.'
Before divulging it to me he blew his nose with a trumpeting sound into his monogrammed silk handkerchief.
'The Secret of Life is always to set yourself attainable goals. They may be easy or difficult, depending on the circumstances and your character and abilities, but they should always be at-tai-na-ble! In fact, I think I'll hang your Uncle Petros' portrait in your room, with a caption: example to be avoided!'
It's impossible as I write now, in middle age, to describe the turbulence caused in my adolescent heart by this first, however prejudiced and incomplete, account of Uncle Petros' story. My father had obviously intended it to serve as a cautionary tale and yet for me his words had exactly the opposite effect: instead of steering me away from his aberrant older brother, they drew me towards him as to a brilliantly shining star.
I was awestruck by what I'd learned. Exactly what this famous 'Goldbach's Conjecture' was I didn't know, nor at that time did I care very much to learn. What fascinated me was that the kindly, withdrawn and seemingly unassuming uncle of mine was in fact a man who, by his own deliberate choice, had struggled for years on end at the outermost boundaries of human ambition. This man whom I'd known all my life, who was in fact my close blood relative, had spent his whole life striving to solve One of the Most Difficult Problems in the History of Mathematics! While his brothers were studying and getting married, raising children and running the family business, wearing out their lives along with the rest of nameless humanity in the daily routines of subsistence, procreation and killing time, he, Prometheus-like, had striven to cast light into the darkest and most inaccessible corner of knowledge.
The fact that he had finally failed in his endeavour not only did not lower him in my eyes but, on the contrary, raised him to the highest peak of excellence. Was this not, after all, the very definition of the plight of the Ideal Romantic Hero, to Fight the Great Battle Although You Know It To Be Desperate? In fact, was my uncle any different from Leonidas and his Spartan troops guarding Thermopylae? The last verses of Cavafy's poem I had learned at school seemed ideally applicable to him:
Even before I'd heard Uncle Petros' story, his brothers' derogatory remarks, beyond exciting curiosity, had inspired my sympathy. (This, by the way, had been in contrast to my two cousins' reactions, who bought their fathers' contempt wholesale.) Now that I knew the truth – even this highly prejudiced Version of it -I immediately elevated him to role model.
The first consequence of this was a change in my attitude towards mathematical subjects at school, which I had found till then rather boring, with a resultant dramatic improvement in my performance. When Father saw on the next report card that my grades in Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry had shot up to honours level, he raised a perplexed eyebrow and gave me a queer look. It's possible that he even became slightly suspicious, but of course he couldn't make an issue of it. He could hardly criticize me for excelling!
On the date when the Hellenic Mathematical Society was due to commemorate Leonard Euler's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, I arrived ahead of time at the auditorium, full of expectation. Although high-school maths was of no help in fathoming its precise meaning, the announced lecture's title, ‘Formal Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics', had intrigued me since first reading the invitation. I knew of 'formal receptions' and 'simple logic' but how did the two concepts combine? I'd learned that buildings have foundations – but mathematics?
I waited in vain, however, as the audience and the Speakers took their places, to see among them the lean, ascetic figure of my uncle. As I should have guessed, he didn't come. I already knew he never accepted invitations; now I'd learned he didn't make exceptions even for mathematics.
The first speaker, the president of the Society, mentioned his name, and with particular respect:
'Professor Petros Papachristos, the world-renowned Greek mathematician, will unfortunately be unable to deliver his short address, because of a slight indisposition.'
I smiled smugly, proud that only I among the audience knew that my uncle's 'slight indisposition' was a diplomatic one, an excuse to protect his peace.
Despite Uncle Petros' absence, I stayed until the end of the event. I listened fascinated to a brief resume of the honouree's life (Leonard Euler, apparently, had made epoch-making discoveries in practically every branch of mathematics). Then, as the main speaker took the podium and started elaborating on the 'Foundations of Mathematical Theories by Formal Logic', I feil into a charmed state. Despite the fact that I didn't completely understand more than the first few words of what he said, my spirit wallowed in the unfamiliar bliss of unknown definitions and concepts, all symbols of a world which, although mysterious, impressed me from the start as almost sacred in its unfathomable wisdom. Magical, previously unheard-of names rolled on and on, enthralling me with their sublime music: the Continuum Problem, Aleph, Tarski, Gottlob Frege, Inductive Reasoning, Hilbert's Programme, Proof Theory, Riemannian Geometry, Verifiability and Non-Verifiability, Consistency Proofs, Completeness Proofs, Sets of Sets, Universal Turing Machines, Von Neumann Automata, Russell's Paradox, Boolean Algebras… At some point, in the midst of these intoxicating verbal waves washing over me, I thought for a moment I discerned the momentous words 'Goldbach's Conjecture'; but before I could focus my attention the subject had evolved along new magical pathways: Peano's Axioms for Arithmetic, the Prime Number Theorem, Closed and Open Systems, Axioms, Euclid, Euler, Cantor, Zeno, Gödel…
Paradoxically, the lecture on the 'Foundations of Mathematical Theories by Formal Logic' worked its insidious magic on my adolescent soul precisely because it disclosed none of the secrets that it introduced – I don't know whether it would have had the same effect had its mysteries been explained in detail. At last I understood the meaning of the sign at the entrance of Plato's Academy: oudeis ageometretos eiseto – 'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter'. The moral of my evening emerged with crystal clarity: mathematics was something infinitely more interesting than solving second-degree equations or calculating the volumes of solids, the menial tasks at which we laboured at school. Its practitioners dwelt in a veritable conceptual heaven, a majestic poetic realm totally inaccessible to the un-mathematical hoi polloi.
The evening at the Hellenic Mathematical Society was the turning point. It was then and there that I first resolved to become a mathematician.
At the end of that school year I was awarded the school prize for highest achievement in Mathematics. My father boasted about it to Uncle Anargyros – as if he could have done otherwise!
By now, I had completed my second-to-last year of high school and it had already been decided that I would be attending university in the United States. As the American System doesn't require students to declare their major field of interest upon registration, I could defer revealing to my father the horrible (as he would no doubt consider it) truth for a few more years. (Luckily, my two cousins had already stated a preference that assured the family business of a new generation of managers.) In fact, I misled him for a while with vague talk of plans to study economics, while I was hatching my plan: once I was safely enrolled in university, with the whole Atlantic Ocean between me and his authority, I could steer my course toward my destiny.