For myself I retained only two of its items, volume seventeen of Leonard Euler's Opera Omnia and issue number thirty-eight of the German scientific Journal Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik. These humble memorabilia were symbolic, as they defined the boundaries of Uncle Petros' essential life-story. Its starting-point is in a letter written in 1742, contained in the former, wherein the minor mathematician Christian Goldbach brings to the attention of the great Euler a certain arithmetical observation. And its termination, so to speak, is to be found in pages 183-98 of the erudite Germanic Journal, in a study entitled 'On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems', authored in 1931 by the until then totally unknown Viennese mathematician Kurt Gödel.

Until I reached mid-adolescence I would see Uncle Petros only once a year, during the ritual visit on his name day, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on the twenty-ninth of June. The custom of this annual meeting had been initiated by my grandfather and as a consequence had become an inviolable obligation in our tradition-ridden family. We journeyed to Ekali, a suburb of Athens today but in those days more of an isolated sylvan hamlet, where Uncle Petros lived alone in a small house surrounded by a large garden and orchard.

The contemptuous dismissal of their older brother by Father and Uncle Anargyros had puzzled me from my earliest years and had gradually become for me a veritable mystery. The discrepancy between the picture they painted of him and the impression I formed through our scant personal contact was so glaring that even an immature mind like mine was compelled to wonder.

In vain did I observe Uncle Petros during our annual visit, seeking in his appearance or behaviour signs of dissoluteness, indolence or other characteristics of the reprobate.