Apostolos Doxiadis

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Αpostolos Doxiadis - concept, story and script

Apostolos Doxiadis was born in Australia of Greek parents, and grew up in Athens. He studied mathematics at undergraduate and graduate level, first at Columbia University in New York and then at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Upon his return to Greece, he started to direct for the theatre, puppet theatre and cinema; his second feature film, Terirem, earning the International Art Cinema award at the 1988 Berlin Festival.

He published four novels in Greek and, in 1999, translated into English his Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture. Uncle Petros became a bestseller in many of the thirty-plus languages in which it has been published to date. It was short-listed for the Prix Médicis Étranger and was awarded the first Peano Prize, an international award for books related to mathematics. In addition to its wide readership, Uncle Petros has received enthusiastic reviews the world over, as well as praise from luminaries such as Nobel laureate John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame), psychiatrist and author Oliver Sacks, critic George Steiner, playwright Michael Frayn, Fields Medallist Sir Michael Atiyah, and many other important writers, intellectuals and scientists, while the Independent’s Gilbert Adair has hailed it as pioneering the new genre of “mathematical fiction” – a branding, incidentally, Apostolos is not too crazy about. Apostolos wrote a play on Kurt Gödel, called Seventeenth Night, which was staged in 2004.

Apart from his work in fiction and the theatre, in the past few years, Apostolos has written and lectured extensively on the relationship of mathematics to narrative and the theory of narrative intelligence. In 2005, he founded the not-for-profit international organization Thales and Friends, and organized the first “Mathematics and Narrative” meeting at Mykonos, a meeting Nature magazine hailed as marking “the beginning of a rapprochement between the estranged arts of mathematics and storytelling”.