Background

Apostolos Doxiadise was born in 1953 in Brisbane, Australia, where his father, the architect Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis was working. After his birth, the family returned to Athens, where Doxiadis grew up. His father’s death and family reasons made him return to Greece in 1975, interrupting his graduate studies.

Education

Apostolos Doxiadis was extremely interested in poetry, fiction, and the theatre. His intense interest in mathematics led Doxiadis to leave school at the age of fifteen, to attend Columbia University, in New York. As a result, he obtained a bachelor's degree in Mathematics in May 1972. Apostolos Doxiadis attended the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He got a master's degree, with a thesis on the mathematical modeling of the nervous system in 1974.

Career

Apostolos Doxiadis made his first film, The Call, when he was still in high school. This film won a prize at the first American Student Film Festival, which was held in 1968. After that, Doxiadis created the following films include Underground Passage, which appeared in 1983, and Terirem, which was completed five years later.

In Greece, although involved for some years with the computer software industry, Doxiadis returned to his childhood and adolescence loves of theatre and the cinema, before becoming a full-time writer. Doxiadis directed in the professional theatre, in Athens, and worked as a translator, translating, among other plays, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Doxiadis wrote various Greek-language publications, including Makavettas, Ho theios Petros kai heeikasia tou gkolntmpach: Mythistorema, and Ta tria anthropakia: Mythistorema. Doxiadis created Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture, originally published in Greek. Apostolos has written two plays, the musical shadow puppet play The Tragical History of Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionist, accompanied by a volume of texts and images, Paralipomena, and Seventeenth Night, a fictional recreation of the last days in the life of logician Kurt Gödel.

Since the mid-eighties, most of Apostolos’ work has been in fiction. He has written four novels in Greek, Parallel Life (1985), Makavettas (1988), Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture (1992) and Three Little Men (1997).

In 1998, Doxiadis translated into English, significantly reworking, his third novel, which was published in England in 2000 as Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture, to great critical acclaim, and has since been translated into over forty languages. In autumn 2009 the graphic novel Logicomix was published, co-authored with Christos H. Papadimitriou, with art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna. The book’s story is based on the epic quest for the foundations of mathematics. Logicomix was published in Autumn 2009 by Bloomsbury in the U.S. and the U.K. and has been translated, to date, into over twenty languages.

Apart from Doxiadis’ work in the various modes of storytelling, Apostolos has been working on the study of theoretical aspects of narrative, as well as the relationship of mathematics and narrative. He has published numerous articles on this subject, including recent work on the genesis of mathematical-deductive proof in ancient Greece, as a development of poetic and narrative techniques. A volume on these subjects, co-edited with Barry Mazur, was published in 2011 (Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative, Princeton University Press).

Doxiadis has a lifelong interest in logic, cognitive psychology, and rhetoric, as well as the theoretical study of narrative. In 2007, he organized, with mathematician Barry Mazur, a meeting on the theoretical investigation of the relationship of mathematics and narrative, whose proceedings were published as Circles Disturbed, The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative (2012). Doxiadis has also lectured extensively on his theoretical interests.

Achievements

• The book Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture became an international bestseller and has been published to date in more than thirty-five languages. It has received the praise of, among others, Nobel Laureate John Nash, British mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, critic George Steiner, and psychiatrist Oliver Sacks. Uncle Petros is one of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
  
  The novel Logicomix (2009) is a number one bestseller on the New York Times Bestseller List and an international bestseller, already published in over twenty languages. The film Terirem won the CICAE (International Confederation of Art Cinemas) prize for Best Film in the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival.
  
  Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture was the first recipient of the Premio Peano, the first international award for books inspired by mathematics and short-listed for the Prix Médicis. Logicomix has earned numerous awards, among them the Bertrand Russell Society Award, the Royal Booksellers Association Award (the Netherlands), the New Atlantic Booksellers Award (USA), the Prix Tangente (France), the Premio Carlo Boscarato (Italy), the Comicdom Award (Greece). It was chosen as "Book of the Year" by TIME Magazine, Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, and other publications.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture

    (Uncle Petros is a family joke - an ageing recluse in a su...)

    2000
  • Logicomix: An epic search for truth

    (This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual ody...)

    2008
  • Makavettas 1988
  • Ho theios Petros kai hē eikasia tou gkolntmpach: Mythistorēma 1992
  • Ta tria anthrōpakia: Mythistorēma 1997

Religion

Apostolos Doxiadis has never been a religious man, yet he believes there is great underlying wisdom in the ritual.

Interests

• cinema, theater, books

• Writers

  Shakespeare

Connections

Apostolos lives in Athens with his wife, the novelist Dorina Papaliou, and their three children. They got divorced. Now he has a wife Vasia Panagopoulou. She is an actress.

Father:

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis

ex-wife:

Dorina Papaliou

Wife:

Vasia Panagopoulou

colleague:

Barry Mazur

References

• Apostolos Doxiadis website