Article :
"A life that doesn't add up: The Cambridge maths genius who is now a recluse living on tinned mackerel
By Frances Hubbard
Simon Norton hasn't held down an academic position since 1985
Simon Norton, dressed in a greasy zipped-up outdoor jacket and mud-stiffened trousers, is reclining on the bare mattress in his front room, propped on one elbow like an unkempt bathing belle posing for a seaside snap.
Simon, 58, is a mathematical genius who conforms to so many stereotypes he defies parody. His grey hair stands on end as if electrified, he has a complete disdain for personal grooming, but a passion for tinned fish and public transport. He lives surrounded by hillocks of books.
He is also the subject of a new biography, The Genius In My Basement, by his former tenant, the author Alexander Masters, which considers why the once-famous child prodigy withdrew from the world.
Simon’s IQ was measured as 185 at the age of three (the average is 100; 140 is generally thought to be exceptional). He had mastered his 91 times table by the age of five and, having left Eton and gone on to Cambridge, achieved the required score for a First four times over. Yet he hasn’t held down an academic position since 1985.
The answer as to why is buried under pages of jollity in the book. Simon lost what could be described as ‘the love of his life’.
My first contact with him sets the tone. At the bottom of a flight of stairs, he opens the front door of the basement of his Cambridge house a couple of grudging inches to peer at me from under wiry eyebrows.
‘Er, can you go up the steps to the main front door so I can let you in that way?’
Simon’s downstairs lair — he doesn’t like the word ‘flat’ — features so vividly and, at times, revoltingly, in the book that it counts as a secondary character. Grease-streaked, musty, stuffed with fascinating titbits and reeking of mackerel, it’s described as a black hole that’s swallowed all attempts at order.
Though Simon owns the whole house, he lives in the basement and lets out the rooms above, which is how he came to know Alexander Masters. I was desperate to see what is referred to in the book as “The Excavation”, but have to make do with a glimpse through the window. It looks disappointingly tidy.
Simon reappears on the ground floor when I knock, and guides me into a room that contains for seating a bed and an armchair. I take the chair. He paces the gritty carpet and occasionally lies down.
For three years running, between the ages of 15 and 17, Simon scored top marks as a member of the British team in the International Maths Olympiad
Since the usual social lubricants such as cups of tea don’t interest Simon, it’s straight to the point — which is what he thinks of the new biography.
‘Er, er, I feel slightly uncomfortable with the whole thing.’ Long pause.
‘I’ve sort of been trying to ignore it. I haven’t read it since I gave my final comments after Alexander showed me drafts of it. Seeing things about myself that may or may not be true, which I’d rather were not known is, er, he was, er, probing for things that might not be there.’
But why did he agree to collaborate on the work?
'Well, he pushed me a bit. I thought it might save the trouble of writing my own autobiography.’ He pauses. ‘I no longer think that.’
Alexander Masters’ last book was the acclaimed Stuart, A Life Backwards, about a happy-go-lucky boy who grew up to be a drug-using criminal.
Alexander was already living in Simon’s house when that book was written.
He then turned his attention to his landlord, describing writing about this more opaque figure as being like ‘trying to write a biography of a hedge’.
Simon’s smile is serene.
‘I’m sure there are nature experts who would be delighted by that analogy,’ he says.
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Born to a prosperous Jewish family 58 years ago, Simon’s father, Richard, was a remote figure who helped to run the family jewellery shop, S. J. Phillips, in London’s New Bond Street. It’s the oldest privately-owned business of its kind in the world.
Today, Simon’s brother Francis runs the concern and supplies Simon with an income, which he barely spends.
‘Shopping, for me, is complete and utter hassle. Tedium,’ he says. ‘I don’t mind buying routine things, such as socks, or browsing in book shops but I’ve never been motivated by money. I mean, it’s not as if I live extravagantly’
Simon’s beloved mother Helene, who kept all of his childhood maths doodles, taught him quadratic equations. But he didn’t really need her help. Before he could talk, he was arranging his building blocks into coloured patterns and, at the age of three, he was working out tottering pyramids of long multiplication. For fun.
At his prep school, Ashdown House in Sussex, his headmaster recognised his young pupil’s extraordinary gifts and did his best to nurture them, but Simon was bullied. There is still a vulnerability and innocence about him that you can see must have been irresistible to nasty boys.
On the sports pitch, he would spend his time calculating the angles of the blades of grass
When he sat his maths entrance paper at Eton, he yodelled for joy at the ease of the questions. The result was so astounding that the only comment from the marker was two exclamation marks. While still at school he gained a first-class external degree from London University.
For three years running, between the ages of 15 and 17, Simon scored top marks as a member of the British team in the International Maths Olympiad, a competition for gifted teenagers.
On the sports pitch, he would spend his time calculating the angles of the blades of grass.
Later, at Cambridge, where he gained his doctorate, he worked on an area called group theory and co-wrote a mathematical classic, the Atlas Of Finite Groups, which took 15 years to produce and was published in 1985, when he was 33.
His particular interest is a theoretical symmetrical shape called The Monster, which has an almost inexpressible number of sides. Awards, plaudits, and academic glory should have followed, as they did for his main collaborator and mentor, Professor John Conway.
What went wrong? Everything and nothing, according to him.
Conway, who’d been a gregarious and revered father-figure, moved to America to take up a post at Princeton University in New Jersey. Suddenly, Simon’s main champion and closest intellectual companion was gone, a loss he describes as ‘a sort of bereavement’.
‘I remember 40 years ago, I’d just discovered him and was delighting in the new mathematical world to which he was introducing me. It was, yes, if you like, a love affair of the mind. I found I could never work as efficiently without him.’
Has he felt as close to anyone since?
‘No,’ he says. ‘I went to see him a few times in the U.S. but it wasn’t the same. The old magic wasn’t there. It wasn’t intense enough.’
Simon, it seems, had a lecturing style that actually lost rather than attracted students, and he was banned from teaching. It seems few of his remaining colleagues were keen to work with him. Denied the stimulating environment he loved, he found himself at a ‘loose end’.
Simon is, of course, far from the only brilliant child who has failed to live up to the enormous expectations placed upon him.
A study published last year found that out of 210 gifted children whose progress was followed into later life, only 3 per cent went on to fulfil their early potential.
Researchers from Middlesex University found that many failed to excel because of the way they were treated — often put under too much pressure and separated from their peer group so they found it difficult to make friends.
In Simon’s case, he admits to leading a solitary life and has had little success with — or interest in — the opposite sex.
‘I read in the New Scientist a few years ago an article about asexual people and I thought: “Ah! That’s me.”
He adds: ‘I’ve sort of had a feeling that settling down with someone might be a good idea, but I’ve never had any practical urges. There have been one or two people I’ve met who I’ve fantasised about relationships with, but I’ve never made steps towards it.
He admits to leading a solitary life and has had little success with — or interest in — the opposite sex
‘And there are other things. I couldn’t go to discos to meet girls because my ears are very sensitive to noise and they hurt.’ (Low tolerance of noise, along with several other of Simon’s idiosyncrasies, are symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome — a mild form of autism — but he has never been diagnosed.)
Has he felt lonely?
‘Yes. But some of the things that go with sociability don’t interest me — such as gossip-type things or dressing things. I am not interested in clothes.’
Simon prefers to wear things until they disintegrate, and his jacket has a sheen that indicates it has not been washed in a very long time.
His mother, who died in 2002, used to make him have a bath and change into an outfit she kept specially for his visits to see her before she would kiss him ‘hello’.
If this fascinating man is peculiarly careless about many everyday aspects of life, he can be deeply affected by issues close to his heart.
The loss of Professor Conway was followed by another setback in 1986 — which Simon calls ‘an additional trauma’ — when the Deregulation of the Buses Act came into force under Margaret Thatcher.
This mundane piece of legislation caused him profound distress. Bus routes were opened to competitive tender and Simon, appalled by the destruction of what he saw as vital public transport services, found a new focus for his intellectual passion.
His fascination with public transport had begun 20 years earlier when he was taking his first degree. On a visit to London University, he came across cache of London Transport publicity leaflets that triggered a devotion that has never waned.
Proof of his commitment is the £10,000 a year he provides to fund the Transport Campaigner of The Year Award. In 2008, it was won by a member of the environmental group Plane Stupid, who proceeded to superglue himself to Gordon Brown’s sleeve when he collected the prize.
Perhaps this fascination with public transport is related to Simon’s aversion to cars. He recalls feeling nauseated on journeys with his mother as a boy thanks to the smells of petrol fumes and her cigarette smoke.
Simon fixes a distant stare out of the window.
‘There’s a sort of linkage between those events in my life,’ he says.
‘Conway lived in a village some way out of Cambridge, and he was often so engrossed in his work he missed the last bus out, and I think as a result he neglected his wife and took up with another woman. That led to a divorce.
‘He had to go to America to get enough money to pay for it. Perhaps if there had been a better bus service in those days . . .’ I can’t tell if he’s joking but I laugh, and so does he. Who knows?
Simon, it must be said, is a deeply endearing man. He’s also a man fuelled by conviction who’s involved with campaign groups.
At weekends, he takes regular solo trips to Salisbury Plain or the Shetlands, or wherever else he fancies. He is affable company and has a sly sense of humour.
Buses aside, he still publishes maths papers, consults with other academics and works on mathematical problems for his own entertainment.
So what does he think about how his life has turned out, given his meteoric early career?
‘It’s not so much that mathematicians burn out, but that they have explored their areas of competence quite early,’ Simon says, a touch defensively. ‘At least, I think that may be the case with me.
‘There are still things to be done, but certainly a lot of the ground has been covered.’
Another of his pauses follows. We both stare out of the window.
‘It may be true that I haven’t been as, er, that I haven’t always applied myself as much as I should have done.’
Perhaps it’s the case that having simply ‘got’ maths by an extraordinary combination of brains and intuition since he was little, he doesn’t really understand the idea of sweating at a subject.
The new book about Simon is subtitled: ‘A biography of a happy man.’ I ask him if this is true.
‘This is one of my issues with the book. I’m happy in the sense that I think I’ve come to terms with my own character. I suspect many people don’t. Am I exclusively ‘happy’? No. Am I, in the main, happy? Er, if Alexander says so.’
Hedge-like, indeed. Perhaps the problem is simply that Simon Norton is much, much cleverer than anyone who attempts to define him."
Un livre a été écrit à son sujet "The Genius in my Basement" :
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Genius-my-Basem ... 0007243383
