When it was all over, he asked me to go back home for some chess, 'for purposes of recovery'. We started a game. I was a good enough player by that time to offer him decent resistance but not so good as to hold his interest after the ordeal he'd been through.

'What did you think of that circus?' he asked me, finally looking up from the board.

'The award ceremony? Oh, it was a bit boring, but I'm still glad you went through with it. Tomorrow it will be in all the newspapers.'

'Yes,’ he said, 'how the Papachristos Method for the Solution of Differential Equations is almost on a par with Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, one of the crowning achievements of twentieth-century science… How that fool of a Rector carried on! Did you notice, by the way,’ he added with a sour smile, 'the pregnant silence following the "ooohs" and "aaahs" and "ts-ts-ts's" of admiration at my extreme youth when I made the "great discovery"? You could almost hear everybody wondering: But how did the honouree spend the next fifty-five years of his life?'

Any sign of self-pity on his part bothered me inordinately.

'You know, Uncle,’ I provoked him, 'it's not anybody's fault but your own that people don't know of your work on Goldbach's Conjecture. How could they – you've never told! Had you ever written up a report of your research, things would be different.

The story of your quest itself would make a worth-while publication.'

'Yes,’ he sneered, 'a full footnote in Great Mathematical Failures of Our Century.'

'Well,' I mused, 'science advances by failures as well as successes. And anyway, it was a good thing your work in differential equations was acknowledged. I was proud to hear our family name associated with something other than money.'

Unexpectedly, a bright smile on his face, Uncle Petros asked me: 'Do you know it?'

'Do I know what?'

'The Papachristos Method for the Solution of Differential Equations?'

I'd been taken completely unawares and answered without thinking: 'No, I don't.'

His smile went away: 'Well, I expect they don't teach it anymore…'

I feit an upsurge of excitement – this was the chance I was waiting for. Although I had, in fact, ascertained while at university that the Papachristos Method was no longer taught (the advent of electronic calculation had rendered it obsolete), I lied to him, and with great vehemence: 'Of course they teach it, Uncle! It's just that I never took an elective in differential equations.'

'Get paper and pencil then, and I’ll tell you about it!'

I held back a triumphant cry. It was precisely what I'd hoped for when I had convinced him to accept the medal: that the honour might reawaken his mathematical vanity and rekindle his interest in his art, enough of it anyway to lure him into a discussion of Goldbach's Conjecture and beyond… to his real reason for abandoning it. Explaining to me the Papachristos Method was an excellent introduction.

I rushed to fetch paper and pencil before he changed his mind.

'You'll have to be a little patient,' he began. 'A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. Let's see now,’ he murmured and began to scribble. 'Let us assume we have a partial differential equation in the Clairaut form… there! We now take…'

I followed his scribbles and explanations for almost an hour. Although I couldn't completely follow the argument, I showed exaggerated appreciation at every step.

'It's absolutely brilliant, Uncle!' I cried when he'd finished.

'Nonsense.' He brushed my praise aside, but I could see this modesty was not totally sincere. 'Sheer calculation of the grocery-bill variety, not real mathematics!'

The moment I was waiting for had arrived. 'Then talk to me about real mathematics, Uncle Petros. Talk to me about your work on Goldbach's Conjecture!'

He shot me a sideways glance, cunning, inquisitive and at the same time tentative. I held my breath.

'And what, if I may ask, is the purpose of your interest, Mr Almost-Mathematician?'

I had planned my answer to this beforehand, so as to put him in an emotional impasse.

'You owe it to me, Uncle! If for nothing eise, to compensate me for that summer of anguish in my sixteenth year, when I struggled for three months to prove it myself, floundering in my abysmal ignorance!'

He appeared to be considering this for a while, as if to make a point of not giving in all too easily. When he smiled I knew I had won.

'What exactly do you want to know about my work on Goldbach's Conjecture?'

I left Ekali after midnight with a copy of An Introduction to Number Theory by Hardy and Wright. (I had to prepare myself by learning 'some fundamentals’ he'd said.) I should point out to the non-specialist that mathematical books cannot normally be enjoyed like novels, in bed, in the bathtub, sprawled in an easy chair, or perched on the commode. To 'read' here means to understand, and for that you normally need a hard surface, paper, pencil and quality time. Since I had no intention of becoming a number theorist at the advanced age of thirty, I went through the Hardy-Wright book with only moderate attention ('moderate' in mathematics is 'considerable' by any other measure), without persisting on fully comprehending those details that resisted the initial assault. Even so, and taking into account that the study of the book was not my main occupation, it took me almost a month.

When I returned to Ekali, Uncle Petros, bless his soul, started to examine me as if I were a schoolchild.

'Have you read the whole book?'

'I have.'

'State Landau's Theorem.'

I did.

'Write out for me the proof of Euler 's Theorem of the \phi-function, the extension of Fermat's Little Theorem.'

I took paper and pencil and proceeded to do so, as best as I could.

'Now prove to me that the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function have real part equal to 1/2!'

I burst out laughing and he did too.

'Oh no, you don't!' I said. 'Not again, Uncle Petros! It's enough that you set me to prove Goldbach's Conjecture. Find somebody else to assign the Riemann Hypothesis!'

In the following two and a half months we had our ten 'Lessons on Goldbach's Conjecture', as he called them. What transpired in them is down on paper, with dates and times. Since I was now moving steadily towards the fulfilment of my main aim (his coming face to face with the reason for abandoning his research), I thought I'd also attain a secondary goal while at it: I kept meticulous notes so that, after his death, I could publish a short account of his Odyssey, perhaps an insignificant footnote to mathematical history, but still a worthy tribute to Uncle Petros – if not, alas, to his ultimate success, then certainly to his ingenuity and, more importantly, his dedication and single-minded persistence.

During the course of the lessons I witnessed an amazing metamorphosis. The mild, kindly, elderly gentleman I had known since my childhood, one easily mistaken for a retired civil servant, turned before my eyes into a man illuminated by a fierce intelligence and driven by an inner power of unfathomable depth. I'd caught small glimpses of this species of being before, during mathematical discussions with my old room-mate, Sammy Epstein, or even with Uncle Petros himself, when he sat before his chessboard. Listening to him unravel the mysteries of Number Theory, however, I experienced for the first and only time in my life the real thing. You didn't have to know mathematics to feel it. The sparkle in his eyes and an unspoken power emanating from his whole being were testimony enough. He was the absolute thorough-bred, pure unadulterated genius.

An unexpected fringe benefit was that the last remaining trace of ambivalence (apparently it had been there, dormant, all those years) regarding the wisdom of my decision to abandon mathematics was now dispelled. Watching my uncle do mathematics was enough to confirm it to the full. I was not made of the same mettle as he – this I realized now beyond the shadow of a doubt. Faced with the incamation of what I definitely was not, I accepted at last the truth of the dictum: Mathematicus nascitur non fit. The true mathematician is born, not made. I had not been born a mathematician and it was just as well that I had given up.