Obituaries
Obituary: Simon Norton
Maths genius whose solutions unfolded with balletic grace
March 28, 2019 09:46
By, gloria tessler
3 min read
Maths genius whose solutions unfolded with balletic grace
March 28, 2019 09:46ByGloria Tessler, gloria tessler
He was the child prodigy who became a world class mathematician, but Simon Norton, who has died aged 66, ended his life in a Cambridge basement amid plastic bags, tinned food and discarded socks.
His dying may have symbolised the fall of the mighty but his life was celebrated at the high table of academia, where he was lauded as one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century. As a teenager he scored the top grade for three consecutive years at the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world’s toughest test of mathematical genius, and won a prize for the elegance of his solutions. His biographer Alexander Masters, said: “What made his work beautiful was not its complexity but its simplicity – he laid down his pellucid solutions to questions involving imaginary numbers, infinity and the distribution of primes with the grace of a ballerina unfolding her hands.”
Such graceful mental acuity allied to his playful manner, inspired Masters’ biography, The Genius in My Basement. His “eerie brilliance”, as Masters saw it, was epitomised in his work with mathematician John Conway at Cambridge on the Atlas of Finite Groups,which maps the symmetries of the universe. Together the pair investigated a hyperdimensional, mathematic entity called Monstrous Moonshine, dubbed The Monster for its complexity.
What was The Monster? Cryptically Norton explained: “It is the voice of God.”
This divine recognition followed 15 years of magical thinking as he worked on his Atlas, where the study of prime numbers would embrace philosophy and metaphysics. But in his biography Masters could not link the inner and outer man. Norton was clearly galvanised by what he could reveal, yet was unable to cope with the reality of failure. That moment of truth came in a 1984 meeting when Norton made his first ever error when asked to do a calculation. The mistake unnerved him. He was already bereft when his beloved colleague Conway moved to Princeton, but another blow came when Cambridge failed to renew his contract the following year, citing his eccentric lecturing style which they thought deterred students.
Born into a Sephardi family of Iraqi descent, Norton was the youngest of three brothers. His father Richard ran the jewellery firm S J Phillips. So passionate was Richard’s love of Victoriana that he dreamed the life aristocratic with a footman behind every chair at the family dinner. But while his father indulged unattainable fantasies, his mother Elaine née Manasseh saw the real dream in her son’s exceptional talents. She noticed that at the age of one and a half he sorted his toy bricks into geometric patterns rather than throw them across the room as his older brothers had done. She organised an IQ test when he was three involving sophisticated counting tests and he scored 178. The test gave him an IQ of 185 – (genius level is 140). At four he was playing with percentages, square numbers, factors and long division.
Norton’s quirky disposition was also developing. At five he mastered his 91 times table, changed his name to Five and called his mother – “My darling 45.” At his prep school, Ashdown House in Sussex he spent his sports practice calculating the angles of blades of grass. At ten he sat the Eton entrance exam, unnerving the examiner with his triumphant singing, and gaining the highest scholarship score in the school’s history. Before taking his A levels he gained a First in an external pure maths degree at London University. At Trinity College, Cambridge he achieved a stunning 50 alphas in his finals and stayed to work with John Conway on their Atlas of Finite Groups.
When Cambridge refused to renew his contract, family finances enabled him to rent out two flats in his large house while he lived in its “rampantly chaotic” basement, according to Masters, who became his tenant. But Norton was generous to a fault; he was the only Cambridge landlord to reduce his rent when Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax was introduced.
So intense was Norton’s other love, public transport, that he campaigned against cars, wrote for transport magazines and donated £10,000 to an annual transport activism fund. Despite Cambridge’s assertion that he had suffered a “catastrophic mental collapse,” he continued to publish and devise maths problems for his own entertainment. He is survived by his brothers Michael and Francis.
GLORIA TESSLER
Simon Norton: born February 28, 1952.Died February 13, 2019
