Apostolos Doxiadis

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Apostolos Doxiadis

Apostolos Doxiadis ( Greek Απόστολος Δοξιάδης , * 1953 in Brisbane , Australia ) is a Greek writer .

life and work

Doxiadis grew up in Greece and studied applied mathematics from 1968 at Columbia University and at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris (among other things, he worked on mathematical models of the nervous system). He then returned to Greece, directed the theater and also appeared as an actor. In 1983 he made his first Greek film (Underground Passage).

For his second film Terirem from 1986, he won the 1988 prize of the International Center for Artistic Cinema (CICAE) at the Berlin Film Festival . At the same time he wrote novels, Parallel-Leben 1985, Macbeth 1988, his bestseller Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Hypothesis 1992 (which he himself translated into English in 2000, it was translated into 30 languages), and The Three Little People 1997 (all in Greek) . He wrote an autobiography and wrote for music theater ( The tragic story of Jackson Pollock , for puppet shadow theater 1999) and theater ( The 17th Night , 2006, about the last days by Kurt Gödel , performed in Athens).

He also translated William Shakespeare and Eugene O'Neill into Greek. In 2008 the comic book story Logicomix was published with the Californian computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou about the history of mathematical logic. For his book on mathematics and the art of storytelling, Doxiadis worked with mathematician Barry Mazur .

Doxiadis is married with three children and lives in Athens.

Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Hypothesis

This novel is about a former mathematical “child prodigy” Petros Papachristos, who dedicates his life to solving a notoriously difficult mathematical conjecture (the Goldbach conjecture ), but fails because of it, but is still satisfied with himself.

Fonts (selection)

  • Uncle Petros and the Goldbach hypothesis ("Uncle Petros and Goldbach's conjecture"). Lübbe Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 2001, ISBN 3-785-70951-X .
  • with Christos Papadimitriou , Alecos Papadatos , Annie di Donna: Logicomix: an epic search for truth . From the English by Ebi Naumann. Zurich: Atrium-Verlag, 2012 (excerpt from it and Marjorie Senechal for a Mathematics and Narrative meeting on Mykonos, which Doxiadis helped to organize, in: Mathematical Intelligencer, 2006, No. 2)
  • with Barry Mazur : Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Princeton University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0691149042 .

literature

  • David Foster Wallace : Rhetoric and the math melodrama, in: ders .: The fun of the matter. All essays. Cologne 2018. pp. 347–371.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Apostolos Doxiadis, Barry Mazur : Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Princeton University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0691149042 .
  2. ↑ Elements of the well-known Greek mathematicians Constantin Carathéodory (professor in Munich, where Petros also studied) and Christos Papakyriakopoulos (who dedicated his life to solving the Poincaré conjecture after he had solved a famous problem of geometric topology) have been incorporated into the figure .
personal data
SURNAME Doxiadis, Apostolos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek author
DATE OF BIRTH 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Brisbane