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    The Genius in my Basement
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    The Genius in my Basement
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    The Genius in my Basement
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Genius in my Basement

    Written by Alexander Masters

    Narrated by Jot Davies

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    An intimate portrait of an everyday genius.

    Alexander Master’s landlord, Simon, lives in the basement of their Cambridge house. Between teetering towers of outdated maps and slagheaps of plastic bags, Simon eats endless meals of tinned kippers and plans trips on the Cambridge public transport system.

    But Simon was one of the greatest mathematical prodigies of the twentieth century. He spends his time between train journeys working on a theoretical puzzle so complex and critical to our understanding of the universe that it is known as the Monster.

    Poignant and comical, ‘Simon: The Genius in my Basement’ is about the frailty of brilliance and how genius matters very little in the search for happiness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateOct 6, 2011
    ISBN9780007449590
    Unavailable
    The Genius in my Basement
    Author

    Alexander Masters

    Alexander Masters is an author and homeless worker. He is the author of Stuart: A Life Backwards and The Genius in My Basement. Stuart: a Life Backwards, was a Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and Whitbread Book of the Year 2005 in the Biography category. He recently adapted Stuart: a Life Backwards for a BBC film. Alexander Masters lives in London.

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    Reviews for The Genius in my Basement

    3.5/5

    3 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Simon Norton is an eccentric mathematician living in the basement of the author's house in England. The author, Alexander Masters, weaves the tale of the things he had to put up with with Norton living in his house, with a desire to illustrated finite simple groups in a cartoon fashion. Norton is also serious collector of bus timetables, a bus fan, so to speak. Masters is a bit disparaging of the latter, and I wished he had been a liitle more sympathetic, as I collect schedules also. Norton approaches life from the point of view of exhaustive cataloging and that is why he is famous for his work on finite goups, because he got the work to a good state of completion, not often done in the scientific world.
    • 3/5
      Loved the illustrations and the maths even nearly made sense.
    • 4/5
      Another gold nugget found in the remainder bin! A quirky biography about a quirky character - Simon Norton, a maths genus at a young age, who has become a reclusive bag-man and public transport advocate. Masters paints a generous picture, and suggests that Simon needed a guide or mentor - to provide the direction and set the challenges for the genius to respond to. Lovely stuff. Read March 2013.