Author Description

"Simon Norton won a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad at the age of 15 and again at 16; folks said he was the greatest English mathematician since Sir Isaac Newton. And yet, with such promise, Norton always flirted with a darker life, and in this searing biography/memoir of him, Alexander Masters reveals just what happened to Norton to make him eschew regular math -- he was a star at Cambridge as an undergrad and post-grad student -- for a paranoid and difficult life obsessively spent taking bus rides all over England. And what happened is that Norton became fixated on The Monster, a set of numbers so vast that its discovery was hailed by the Mathematical Association of America as 'one of the most spectacular and mysterious achievements of the last fifty years.