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unusual biography of a mathematician and a dedicated public transport

In 2008, during a reception at Downing Street, Gordon Brown, presented a young member of Plane Stupid, a campaign of Transport of the year. During the ceremony, the young man's superglue stick to the Prime Minister. The award is sponsored - £ 10,000 per year - by Simon Phillips Norton, a wealthy and reclusive obsessive public transport who live surrounded by the schedules, ticket stubs, Batchelors Savoury Rice packs in a ruined house several of the occupation of Cambridge. A former child prodigy, who is still considered one of the mathematicians in the world who live very well, even if you do not press an academic position since 1985, when he was 33. And it used to be alive at Alexander Masters owner, which is how he tries to find himself the subject of this book.

"I do not like his books, Alex," Simon said in the title of a chapter of mastery. "The representation of me as interesting is inaccurate," said another. "Be very careful not to jump to easy answers," said John Horton Conway, a fellow mathematician. "My God, I have a feeling this book will be a disaster for me," Simon said in the caption of the book . Masters first book Stuart: A Life Backwards

(2005) won the Guardian First Book Award. Master tells the story of how, as a graduate of mathematics at Cambridge, he obtained a Wintercomfort work part time (a shelter for the homeless, where they were imprisoned a director and a director in 1999 for allegedly allowing traffic drugs on the premises). Customers, employees, friends, support the campaign, and thus, Masters found lying in his lot with Stuart Shorter, a young man struggling with a past that includes heroin, Largactil, solvents, progressive disability and repeated rape of children. The book was in it clippings, Ronald Searle master-ish pictures and comments from Stuart running the job was. "It's annoying the hell ... No, Alexander, you have to start again" and crosslinked poly, warm and hard and fun, the book was a triumph, a brilliant piece of the author of the documentary. Stuart died in 2002 before it is terminated -. Coroner recorded an open verdict after that it has appeared before a train

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Stuart

Genius

Master begins with the unexpected encounter with a person unusually intimate. (In fact, Simon had an appointment in part on the previous book - "Two times winner of an Olympic gold medal in mathematics, co-author of

Atlas of finite groups" / aa> Stuart

The Last Samurai - another story of child prodigies - novelist Helen DeWitt imagine the "Writers of the Future" to learn to do in words what Cezanne and Schoenberg was nearly a century, with painting and music, and the work of its best moments master has something of that emotion, something new and risky open and humane. The drawings, for example, which form the basis of group theory: rows and rows of boxes with a 90, 180, 270 degrees, apparently unchanged, except for how it moves are represented, waving his arms and legs little humanoids - a charming view of giftedness synesthesia. "Maths is this:. The stage of existence, the touchstone of all activities came to Simon that the green fields and dark forests of other Colleges: pleasant places to be transported, convulsions, that rang in the afternoon. "

other parties, however, get cranky and overegged. So yes, the seats are nice - but was it really necessary to invent "Miss Saucy Triangle" with their high heels and panties? She also could have done without the chapter printed in white on black (because it is dark in the cellar of Simon) and the joke of the call "LESS Norton Simon" (because it has no presence as absence, ho ho). And the bit with command and imagines that it becomes its theme - is a picture of him going to a party dressed as the number 7

addition, there is something odd subtitle of the book - Biography of a happy man