It concerns a young man's interaction with his reclusive uncle, who sought to prove a famous unsolved mathematics problem, called Goldbach's Conjecture, that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes.

[1][2][3][4][5] Petros Papachristos, a child prodigy, is brought by his father, a Greek businessman, to the University of Munich to verify his genius with Constantin Caratheodory, a Greek-German mathematician.

He is then offered a professorship in Munich, which he accepts because it was far from the great mathematical centres of the time, and it was therefore the ideal place to live in isolation while tackling the Goldbach conjecture.

During a research visit at Trinity College, however, he learns from a young mathematician named Alan Turing of the existence of the incompleteness' theorem by Kurt Gödel.

Before World War II, for political reasons he is repatriated in Greece and he settles in Ekali, a small town near Athens, where he abandons mathematics and devotes himself to chess.