while browsing through nature a couple of days ago i came across a brief review for uncle petros and goldbach's conjecture. ever mr. soh's bunny rabbit, even after all these years, i checked the book out of nlb and finished it in a couple of sittings yesterday. as a novel it was nothing too special; it did, however, spur me on to read a little more about goldbach's conjecture, which states that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of 2 primes. the problem is 250 years old, and it is, to date, unsolved, despite the publishers of uncle petros offering a million dollar prize for a proof in 2002.

i enjoy how such simple statements can spawn the exorbitantly complex proofs that they do. once upon a time, before my brain died and i started punctuating and spelling completely at random, i downloaded andrew wiles' proof of fermat's last theorem to see if i might understand anything of his argument. (i know. we were young then.), that was around the time i *almost* embarked on a second major in mathematics (bet you didn't know that), the time before better sense prevailed. what i enjoyed most about the wiles paper, i think, was just having it on my desk. while it sat there i owned it -- on some level at least -- even though (to me) not a word or symbol within it made sense.