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At the age of three, had an IQ of Norton Simon Phillips 178th By five, he could rattle his 91 times table. At Cambridge he was the greatest math prodigy she had ever seen. So what has happened to his career? Alexander Masters on a story that doesn 't add up

Simon was a year old, playing in the dining room. He took a pink block from the pile next to his knee. Carefully, he placed a blue stone next to it. He leaned over longer pink brick and pushed them against the blue.

His mother, fold napkins in half way through Bishops 'miters, held in awe.

One blue, one pink.

A blue, two pinks.

A blue, three cloves.

From the chaos of nature, was her little son enforce regularity.

It took the birth of our species from prehistoric times to the beginning of the Babylonian civilization, to learn mathematics. Simon had come over his spurs in a little over 12 months. After three years, 11 months and 26 days, he toddled off in long multiplication. The percentages, square numbers, factors, long division, its 81 and 91 times tables: Simon mastered this when he was five.

Dhuunk, dhuunk, dhuunk ... That 's the sound of a once-in-a-generation genius. Simon Phillips Norton. He lives under my floor. When I moved into this house in Cambridge, I had no idea what the sounds were. But after eight years, I know it 's the great man' s feet, from one end of his room, pounding on the other side. His bed is directly under my 10ft. My study is on top of his living room. His stomping space extends the full depth of the building, under my floor.

Simon has lived here since 1981. Once your eyes have adjusted to the gloom, you'll see that it's made up of two rooms: a main one, which extends 30ft from end to end, and the 1970s school-block type of extension at the back that ends with a set of sliding doors opening on to brambles.

It 's easier to describe here, where paper, plastic bags and books rather than where they are, they' re not on the ceiling. Rammed in each of these plastic carrier, jumped in and dive acquisition tables, chairs sloshing against the bed's legs: Bus. Tens of thousands of them. All out of date.

Within this first room or a cave at the bottom of a giraffe pile, a ring-bound book, a half-inch thick, letter box is red, the size of a tea-tray: Atlas of finite groups, one of the greatest mathematical publications of the second half of the 20th Century. It 's got Simon' s name.

After buses and trains, the thing that matters most to Simon is his digestive tract.

"Mackerel Norton" is his number one meal.

1 x Batchelors Chinese rice flavor packet. ("Am I sometimes golden vegetables \.")

Rice bubble foam maybe for the right time.

Release spurt rice, mackerel open to eat on the bed with much waving of hands, and sips of cool air.

The monster is Simon 's special area of ??mathematics, a field known as Group Theory, or the study of symmetry. In 1980 discovered the greatest mathematician of symmetry: the intricate symmetrical atom of all. Because of its size and complexity, was the last atom called "The Monster '. Mathematicians study symmetry with grids of numbers. A sudoku table has nine rows and nine columns of numbers. The monster has 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000.

It 's important to emphasize that in any sense of the word Simon mad. He 's covered in facial hair and wearing bad shoes and pants from the opposite reason: too much spiritual order.

He burps, he thinks you won 't certain about the progress of his digestion, he goes on long, sweaty hikes, and doesn' t change his clothes for a week. But what can he do? Everyone is messy anyway, and there 's no other place for Simon to save its quota. In his head 's no room: all the mess was swept. It 's as pristine as a surgeon there' s operating room.

Simon 's mother, now dead, taught him mathematics, up to quadratic equations. Amazingly, for a British housewife in the 1950s - no one can explain to the family. Simon says he 'sa fluke of genetics. Every birth is a gamble by nature, a throw in the air of infinite possibilities. In Simon 's case, "The molecules done in my favor. None of my brothers is very intelligent."

Francis Norton, Simon 's middle brother, works in a shop called SJ Phillips, the oldest family business of antique jewelry in the world. It 's, as Francis keeps the family alive and profitable, that Simon has never had a job or a mortgage have, and despite the use of 17 different types of bus, train and visitor attraction discount cards, doesn' t really need one of them.

Francis lives on the other side of Hampstead by Simon 's eldest brother, Michael. Each year, Francis and Michael Simon invites to her house for Passover, and every year is Simon with his shoelaces flapping its bus schedules and its smells and eats all the parsley.

Simon 's first mathematical memory, sitting on his parents' bed, drawing up the value of two to the power of 30 One moment he was fidgeting quietly on the pillow, the next he was gliding into the stratosphere by the thousands, and lo and behold! "My life as a mathematician had begun."

At the end of each semester, Billy Williamson, the principal, entered the school bulletin. "On May 17 came the sad news of the death of the Lord Brabazon of Tara, one of the great pioneers of the automobile, aviation and tobogganing." "Next term Norton try to Eton. Is" Williamson wrote for the scholarship exam before asking the setter, Simon a question, he "could his teeth into" \ - some for input from the Cambridge paper, for example. "Oh, don 't worry," wrote back the Eton people (which had all heard rumors about the boy genius), "we will certainly \."

At Ashdown, Simon worked with infinite series, negative numbers, modular arithmetic and 'imaginary' numbers. At Eton, Simon left 's math practice these things behind. It came into the world of magic. In 1966, when Simon was 15 years old, leaving him to Eton, a university degree in pure mathematics to begin. Simon calls it "My Day of Awakening". His "Arrival". "At that moment I felt I really came out."

But he is not talking about mathematics.

He remembers the number of the bus he took to college on the first day. He remembers the locker room, where he can store his books. He can imagine, the first sight he had left the locker 's contents, inexplicably, by the last owner. And after that he forgets. The rest of his three years at Imperial College and later the Royal Holloway College, are over.

It was what was in the closet, his life changed on that day. Folders of London Transport information. She initiated a lifelong fascination with public transport. "I wish that every 14-year-old had a chance to discover the joys of the buses, as I did."

That 's all he has on his time as an undergraduate in London schoolboy say. But an article in the Sunday Times, 3 August, 1969, states that gained weeks after leaving Eton at 17, Simon, a first class honors degree in mathematics at the University of London.

This book - my book - is changing Simon. New sounds have been under my floorboards Massing. Zweeeeeppppth thrruppPH-Dub! - Something rolled up, but stopped abruptly. Shocked by descriptions of his basement, he has begun to clean up and there were fresh discoveries. Finds more newspaper clippings (collected by his mother) about Simon 's terrifying childhood triumphs, his brilliance shining functions applauded at the International Mathematical Olympiads. The clean-up has turned blue and a heavy plastic bag. It includes Simon 's Olympiad answer sheets, in which he scored 100%. What makes his work read well is not, its complexity, but in its simplicity: no drafts or false starts, he puts his transparent solutions to questions about imaginary numbers, infinity and the distribution of primes, with the grace of a ballerina unfolding hands .

Once upon a time, Simon has been cleaned up and anxious to have. Old train tickets (in the green box) from the 1960s, his student campaign letters (yellow) from the 1970s: In the back room by a wall from floor to ceiling wooden shelf on which all amazing with care compiled lined begged local politicians to improve public transport.

But fully after 1985, on the shelves only four-fifths, the file is on the ground. After 1985 - when he suffered some mathematicians say "catastrophic mental breakdown" - Simon took to collect thousands of publications schedule. What happened to him in 1985?

Simon has been fired from his Cambridge history. His life during the period in which he was a student and a leading young researcher is like a movie in which a small figure out of the celluloid was removed with a carpet knife. His classmates were thrilled to know the famous genius was more than happy in her year, making him aware of their parents at a loss when it scraping along the wall seen in the direction of the mathematics faculty with a sequence of plastic bags on your arm - but as a man she barely remembered him.

"He \ this hermetic life," said Professor Bernard Silverman, a fellow of the Royal Society, the former Master of the St. Peter 's College, Oxford, and now Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office. "At an angle to the rest of the world \."

Simon joined a tour group: the Merry Makers, a British Rail Club. "The two things," he says, "I would recommend anyone who is lonely. Politics and public transports"

Simon can with astonishing precision buses and trains, which he took during his time in Cambridge recall it 's anything else that' s gone. The summer came: silk, bra-less tops and string minskirts - oh! Summer, in Cambridge, for boys! Simon? Barrow-in-Furness. Stuck in a train tunnel.

"Oh boy does everything have to make such a ridiculous reason? I liked to trips that 's all."

Simon 's department at Cambridge, said the department "pure" mathematics, that' s Math for Math 'sake, and not for the convenience of physicists and engineers (Applied Mathematics). Five mathematicians, Conway, Curtis, Parker, and Simon Wilson, worked in an office called Atlantis, on the second floor (or was it third? He 's uncertain) in a converted warehouse book. Atlantis threatens every moment under the weight of paper this fall generated five. They produced an almanac of groups without normal subgroup. Conway had the idea, had in 1970: to collect all known information about the various atoms of symmetry - a book of basic wisdom. An atlas of symmetry. It would take until 1973, thought Conway. At the end of the project covered a fraction of the original idea, involved hundreds of mathematicians from all over the world, and lasted 15 years.

Among a selected group, Simon 's status as a solver of long calculations of filigree delicacy mythological. Solutions may often seem to Simon without thoughts or questions for correctness, in the same way, hunger or lust or disgust, appear to the rest of us. Simon's meticulous, never makes mistakes, he focuses on one problem to the point to bury themselves in it.

And suddenly here we are: the critical moment, the biographical climax Simon 's history. We 're in the Atlantis office. It is winter. Three people crucial to the history of group theory in the field, but sometimes a chair occur at each other between the towers of the paper: Conway, Parker and Simon. They discuss J4, fourth Janko Group, page 188 of the atlas.

"Simon" Conway says, "if 2 (1 +12) .3. (M22.2) is an involution centraliser of J4, which is ...?"

Simon answered Conway instantly, of course. Conway, satisfied, returned to his typing. then stopped and gasped, and turned back to Simon. The unbelievable had happened.

"You've made a mistake."

Simon discovered the mistake too, and blushed. "The" Conway says, "is the beginning of the end."

And it was. Was published as soon as possible after the manuscript, Conway emigrated to a professorship in America, yet never despairing of a group at once. With Conway gone, finished work on the Atlas Group Theory and without anyone to provoke and tease him to attack new problems, Simon was lost. The popular image of a brilliant mathematician is a man who looks like Simon, and spends 23 hours a day alone in his mother 's attic solve the toughest problems in existence. But Simon is a different and much more common type of mathematicians. To develop for his genius, he needs vitality and enterprise. Simon had no champions and some mathematical friends. There was nobody there to work with, so that does not he. The Mathematics Department refused to renew his contract. Never, mathematicians said, had she seen such a spectacular and thorough degradation. The career of one of the great mathematical miracle of the 20th Century.

Simon has two explanations for why his genius collapsed. The first is that everyone is mistaken - he was never a big brain, a very fast one. At five, he could do the math of a 12-year-old to 20, the equal of a professor. Then his brain stopped developing. Others began to catch up. They mistook for its equity decline, and said he 'd suffered a catastrophic failure of the intellectual. What else, Simon argues, explains the fact that, despite his infamous "collapse", then he's doing math today, that is as good as, if not better than he 's ever done? Witness his discovery of the "appearance of the Conway group in the projective plane presentation of the monster '(Simon:" I think don' t, I can not understand, that as "\) made two years after Conway had gone to America long after Simon 's actually "first error".

Simon 's second explanation for the loss of his mathematical direction heartbreaking. There is nobody in the mathematical world who work with him. They say it is theirs, too shabby, too old. His talent, capable of an extraordinary moment in the history of algebra (the symmetry of the work at Cambridge in the 70s and 80s), is out of fashion.

Simon is so close to a satisfactory stereotype: the famous mathematician with electrified hair, live in indescribable chaos, the dead and lonely genius. But every time you try to pin him on these categories as he steps firmly aside: he 's not crazy, it' s nothing tragic in itself, is his life intentionally.

In fact, he 's he ran at the feet. He 's has to write a newsletter (about a man who forces his child to grass, because eating the bus sections), and the Liberal Democrats to defeat David Cameron. Simon would have alone time, but politics and buses have dispensed with this: he rarely takes a trip without a few temporary friends. Simon 's lack of depression is exhausting.

The idea that Simon has given the research and spends his time to memorize timetables Schadenfreude romance. Mathematicians are competitive, often nasty, they enjoy the spread of rumors. Simon only likes to travel in buses and trains. He has \ a mathematician 's again for numbers, so he can spout transfer times. Where Simon is different from other middle-aged mathematician is that he did not 't mope over his lost youth. He doesn 't want to sit all day in a neon-lit office building in the development of the 13th Fourier coefficients of a modular function on a 26-dimensional hyperbolic hyperplane, thank you very much - he knows how to do that much better than most of the department. He wants fun.

Perhaps even more so as a genius - in my opinion, Simon has something different to what is really important to achieve. It's a happy man.

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