David Bodanis

A Beautiful Mind

The Genius in My Basement: The Biography of a Happy Man

By

Fourth Estate 360pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

One day in 2007, as many of the world’s greatest mathematicians were assembled in a lecture room at Montreal’s Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, an odd Englishman in his fifties shambled up to the chalkboard. This was Simon Phillips Norton, and although a few of the older mathematicians in the audience had once known him, to the rest he was just the subject of extraordinary, if not necessarily accurate rumour: a genius of the first order, receiving the highest mark ever achieved in Cambridge’s mathematics finals. As a young man his research was spectacular, but then suddenly, in the 1980s, he had some sort of collapse from which he’d never recovered. There was mention of his living in a dark cellar in Cambridge; an obsession with train and bus timetables; and unseemly hygiene.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    • In this month's 'Silenced Voices', looks at the case of Azimjon Askarov, the journalist and human rights… ,
    Follow Us