'Who is that man?' I whispered.

'Take a guess!'

'I haven't the slightest idea – he looks like a street person. Is he mad, or what?'

Sammy giggled. 'That, my friend, is your uncle's nemesis, the man who gave him the pretext for abandoning his mathematical career, none other than the father of the Incompleteness Theorem, the great Kurt Gödel!'

I gasped in amazement. 'My God! That's Kurt Gödel? But, why is he dressed like that?'

'Apparently he is convinced – despite his doctors' total disagreement – that he has a very bad heart and that unless he insulates it from the cold with all those clothes it will go into arrest.'

'But it's warm in here!'

'The modern high priest of Logic, the new Aristotle, disagrees with your conclusion. Which of the two should I believe, you or him?'

On our walk back to the university Sammy expounded his theory: ‘I think Gödel's insanity – for unquestionably he is in a certain sense insane – is the price he paid for coming too close to Truth in its absolute form. In some poem it says that "people cannot bear very much reality", or something like that. Think of the biblical Tree of Knowledge or the Prometheus of your 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.'

There was a wind blowing, lifting dead leaves in whirls around us. I sighed.

I’ll cut a long story (my own) short:

I never did become a mathematician, and this not because of any further scheming by Uncle Petros. Although his 'intuitive' depreciation of my abilities had definitely played a part in the decision by nurturing a constant, nagging sense of self-doubt, the true reason was fear.

The examples of the mathematical enfants terribles mentioned in my uncle's narrative – Srinivasa Ramanujan, Alan Turing, Kurt Gödel and, last but not least, himself – had made me think twice about whether I was indeed equipped for mathematical greatness. These were men who at twenty-five years of age, or even less, had tackled and solved problems of inconceivable difficulty and momentous importance. In this I'd definitely taken after my uncle: I didn't want to become a mediocrity and end up 'a walking tragedy', to use his own words. Mathematics, Petros had taught me, is a field that acknowledges only its greatest; this particular kind of natural selection offers failure as the only alternative to glory. Yet, hopeful as I still was in my ignorance about my abilities, it wasn't professional failure that I feared.

It all started with the sorry sight of the father of the Incompleteness Theorem padded with layers of warm clothing, of the great Kurt Gödel as a pathetic, deranged old man sipping his hot water in total isolation in the lounge of the Institute for Advanced Study.

When I returned to my university from the visit to Sammy, I looked up the biographies of the great mathematicians who had played a part in my uncle's story. Of the six mentioned in his narrative only two, a mere third, had lived a personal life that could be considered more or less happy and these two, significantly, were comparatively speaking the lesser men of the six, Caratheodory and Littlewood. Hardy and Ramanujan had attempted suicide (Hardy twice), and Turing had succeeded in taking his own life. Gödel's sorry state I've already mentioned. [15] Adding Uncle Petros to the list made the statistics even grimmer. Even if I still admired the romantic courage and persistence of his youth, I couldn't say the same of the way he'd decided to waste the second part of his life. For the first time I saw him for what he had clearly been all along, a sad recluse, with no social life, no friends, no aspirations, killing his time with chess problems. His was definitely not a prototype of the fulfilled life.

Sammy's theory of hubris had haunted me ever since I'd heard it, and after my brief review of mathematical history I embraced it wholeheartedly. His words about the dangers of coming too close to Truth in its absolute form kept echoing in my mind. The proverbial 'mad mathematician' was more fact than fancy. I came increasingly to view the great practitioners of the Queen of Sciences as moths drawn towards an inhuman kind of light, brilliant but scorching and harsh. Some couldn't stand it for long, like Pascal and Newton, who abandoned mathematics for theology.

Others had chosen haphazard, improvised ways out – Evariste Galois' mindless daring that led to his untimely death comes immediately to mind. Finally, some extraordinary minds had given way and broken down. Georg Cantor, the father of the Theory of Sets, led the latter part of his life in a lunatic asylum. Ramanujan, Hardy, Turing, Gödel and so many more were too enamoured of the brilliant light; they got too close, scorched their wings, fell and died.

In a short while I realized that even if I did have their gift (which, after listening to Uncle Petros' story, I began seriously to doubt) I definitely did not want to suffer their personal misery. Thus, with the Scylla of mediocrity on the one side and the Charybdis of insanity on the other, I decided to abandon ship. Although I did, come June, eventually get my BA in Mathematics, Ihad already applied for graduate studies in Business Economics, a field that does not traditionally provide material for tragedy.

Yet, I hasten to add, I've never regretted my years as a mathematical hopeful. Learning some real mathematics, even my tiny portion of it, has been for me the most invaluable lesson of life. Obviously, everyday problems can be handled perfectly well without knowledge of the Peano-Dedekind Axiomatic System, and mastery of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups is absolutely no guarantee of success in business. On the other hand, the non-mathematician cannot conceive of the joys that he's beert denied. The amalgam of Truth and Beauty revealed through the understanding of an important theorem cannot be attained through any other human activity, unless it be (I wouldn't know) that of mystical religion. Even if my education was meagre, even if it meant no more than getting my toes wet on the beach of the immense ocean of mathematics, it has marked my life for ever, giving me a small taste of a higher world. Yes, it has made the existence of the Ideal slightly more believable, even tangible.

For this experience I am forever in Uncle Petros' debt: it's impossible I would have made the choice without him as my dubious role model.

My decision to abandon plans of a mathematical career came as a joyful surprise to my father (the poor man had fallen into deep despair during my last undergraduate years), a surprise made even happier when he learned I would be going to business school. When, having completed my graduate studies and military service, I joined him in the family business, his happiness was at last complete.

Despite this volte-face (or maybe because of it?) my relationship with Uncle Petros blossomed anew after I returned to Athens, every vestige of bitterness on my part totally dissipated. As I gradually settled down to the routines of work and family life, visiting him became a frequent habit, if not a necessity. Our contact was an invigorating antidote to the increasing grind of the real world. Seeing him helped me keep alive that part of the self that most people lose, or forget about, with adulthood – call it the Dreamer or the Wonderer or simply the Child Within. On the other hand, I never understood what my friendship offered him, if we exclude the companionship he claimed not to need.

We wouldn't talk all that much on my visits to Ekali, as we'd found a means of communication better suited to two ex-mathematicians: chess. Uncle Petros was an excellent teacher and soon I came to share his passion (though unfortunately not his talent) for the game.