Much of it takes place in the form of a flashback as the protagonist remembers meeting and becoming friends with the murder victim at the International Congress of Mathematics at which David Hilbert gave his famous speech on the future of mathematics. Just by knowing this fact and the years mentioned in the opening paragraph, many astute readers will immediately recognize that Kurt Gödel's famous 1931 paper on decidability, providing a negative answer to one of Hilbert's problems, plays an important role in the novel. Moreover, for these astute readers, the title may reinforce the prejudice that this murder -- like the murder of Hippasus by the Pythagoreans when he discovered the irrationality of the length of the diagonal of a unit square -- was carried out when the victim discovered Gödel's theorem on his own to prevent him from revealing to the world that the consistency of mathematics cannot be verified mathematically. So, I am pleased to inform these savvy readers that the author was smart enough to add a surprise twist, making the story not as predictable as I feared it would be.

The book was originally published in Greek in 2006 and a translation to English was published in 2008. (Actually, it is soon to be published. I have just finished reading a proof of the book which the publisher was kind enough to send my way. The translation is a bit rough, and I'm hoping that a few of the errors I've noticed there can be corrected before the final version appears.) The author is certainly qualified to write mathematical fiction. In addition to being a math professor at Athens College (an elite high school with campuses in Greece and the US), Michaelides has written about mathematical fiction and has translated some of the works listed on this site into Greek (The Parrot's Theorem, Timescape, and D'alembert's Principle).

Of course, this book is sure to be compared with Apostolos Doxiadis' Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture. However, Pythagorean Crimes is really more similar to The Parrot's Theorem and A Certain Ambiguity, as it is clearly an attempt by the author to guide the reader through a detailed presentation of deep mathematics and important mathematical theories using a fictional mystery as motivation. And, like those other novels, it largely succeeds in this goal. (Finally, let me also mention that the portions of the book which take place at the Lapin Agile with Pablo Picasso reminded me of the wonderful play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin. In that play, Picasso meets and talks to Albert Einstein. It is not quite mathematical fiction, but awfully close, and worth seeing in any case.)

Professor Marek, I apologize if you feel that you were misled into purchasing the book because of my review. In fact, I do agree with your claim that the book was a bit too predictable. (As I mention in the review, only one extra twist was thrown into what was otherwise the obvious outcome.) However, I'm not sure I agree with your first point. In Pythagoras' day, as in the early 20th century, the majority of people were concerned with the practical uses of mathematics and were not concerned with the existence of irrational numbers or undecidable propositions. However, at each time, there was a small group of people who had a strong attachment to those existential questions. In the case of the Pythagoreans, it was literally a religious belief that the rational numbers were sufficient to describe anything in the universe, and for those working on the foundations of mathematics in Hilbert's day, there was an almost religious belief in the certainty and power of mathematics. People like Russell and Whitehead were working not only to axiomatize all of mathematics, but to prove that it is consistent and that the truth or falsehood of all meaningful statements was decideable from the axioms. (I think that if they had been more open minded about it, and less fanatical, it would have been immediately apparent to them that mathematics could not prove its own consistency, as they had hoped.) In both cases, the mathematical proof that the truth was more complicated than they had hoped was apparently truly shocking to the people in these groups. So, to me it still seems that the analogy between these two moments in mathematical history -- even if not perfect, not an isomorphism -- is a fruitful one.