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

摘要

In 2007, writer Alexander Masters - author of Stuart: A Life Backwards (2006) - lived above the distinguished mathematician Simon Phillips Norton in Cambridge, UK. Norton helped to devise the 'monstrous moonshine' conjecture, about a mathematical symmetry group in thousands of dimensions known as the Monster; he is also an eccentric who obsesses about buses and Bombay mix. Masters, with his background in maths and physics, has written a fond yet merciless portrait that attempts both to dissect the Monster and to do justice to an extraordinary character.