Every family has its black sheep - in ours it was Uncle Petros.

My father and Uncle Anargyros, his two younger brothers , made sure that my cousins and I should inherit their opinion of him unchallenged.

'That no-good brother of mine, Petros, is one of life's failure,' my father would say at every opportunity. And Uncle Anargyros, during the family get-togethers from which Uncle Petros routinely absented himself, always accompanied mention of his name with snorts and grimaces expressing disapproval, disdain or simple resignation, depending on his mood.

However, I must say this for them: both brothers treated him with scrupulous fairness in financial matters. Despite the fact that he never shared even a slight part of the labour and the responsibilities involved in running the factory that the three inherited jointly from my grandfather, Father and Uncle Anargyros unfailingly paid Uncle Petros his share of the profits. (This was due to a strong sense of family, another common legacy.) As for Uncle Petros, he repaid them inthe same measure. Not having had a family of his own, upon his death he left us, his nephews, the children of his magnanimous brothers, the fortune that had been multiplying in his bank account practically untouched in its entirety.

Specially to me, his 'most favoured of nephew' (his own words), he additionally bequeathed his huge library which I, in turn, donated to the Helleinic Mathematical Society. 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 fur Mathematik und Physik. These humble memorabilia were symbolic, as they defined the boundaries of Uncle Petros's essential life-story. Its starting-point is in a letter written in 1742, contained in the former, wherein 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.