Simon

by Alexander Masters

  The idea that Simon has altogether given up research and spends his time memorizing timetables is schadenfreude romance. Mathematicians are highly competitive, often spiteful; they enjoy spreading rumors. Simon just likes traveling on buses and trains. He has a mathematician’s recall for figures, and so he can spout connection times (as far back as 1979) of the X43 Abergavenny–Brecon and the X63 Brecon–Swansea. That’s not memorization, that’s inevitability.

  Where Simon is different from other middle-aged mathematicians is that he doesn’t mope over his lost youth. He’s got on with things. He’s discovered what makes him content: going on day trips—

  “They are not day trips, they are campaigning.”

  —going campaigning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—and has had the rare courage and lack of concern for public opinion to grab his delight.

  “Duty!”

  Duty. He doesn’t want to sit all day in a neon-lit office block working out the thirteenth Fourier coefficient of a modular function on a twenty-six-dimensional hyperbolic hyperplane, thank you very much—he already knows how to do that much better than most of the rest of the people in the department anyway.

  He wants fun.

  “Aaah, I mean to say…uuugh…it is and it is not about fun. Oh dear. Can I go now, please?”

  And fun means growing your fingernails an inch long, not cutting your hair for three years, wearing polyester trousers until the rips in the seams reach your thigh, and spending tempestuous afternoons in July dragging a bag full of railway brochures and gout pills up a hedgehog track in a Norwegian mountain forest.

  “It is about fun because fun is what this Cameron government wants to destroy with our public-transport services, cutting enjoyable and vital links for the people of Britain, leading to increased pollution, motor traffic and global warming.”

  Simon and I do not agree about how this biography should close any more than we agreed about how it began. Simon says I remain as I have been throughout: shallow, unreliable, obsessed with irrelevant things, obsessed with describing grime, obsessed with comical-sounding bus-stop names, a disaster for facts wherever they have the misfortune to be flushed out by me, a consistent betrayer of biographical honor.

  Frédéric Chopin (another child prodigy) received a famous review from Schumann that trumpeted: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”

  In Simon’s case this cannot any longer be said. But healthy, his mind constantly occupied, fighting an important social cause, he has no sense of loss.

  (“Except about government cuts to buses.”)

  To my mind, Simon has achieved something else which is truly important—perhaps even more so than genius.

  “Hats off, gentlemen…”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he corrects, barging past.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, hats off!” I shout after him: “There goes a happy man!”

  Thank you for sending me the manuscript.

  I have an incentive to deal with it quickly—

  if I can do that I can throw it away.

  Simon

  Acknowledgments

  This book could not have been written without the wizardry of Dido Davies. From helping to transcribe the sound of plastic bags and calculating the typography of a taunt (i.e., Cabbage), to rewriting practically the entire opening chapter, her energetic and inspired suggestions about structure and style, her brilliant, subtle ear for humor and pacing (and her calm encouragement in times when I’ve been about to give the project up in despair) have improved every page immeasurably.

  Simon’s brothers, Michael and Francis, his sister-in-law Amanda, and his cousins Valerie Collis and Prudence Burnett have been generous with their time and provided many of the anecdotes about Simon’s family and early life (on which Simon was especially hopeless). I am also grateful to Michael for the use of the photographs of Simon and of his parents in Chapter 9, and to Amanda (in the same chapter) for the photographs of Simon’s mother and of the stallion Battleaxe. Also, Vera Lucia Ottoni Guedes-Carlos Pereira-Molendini, for her stories and her ebullience: she was Simon’s mother’s companion, and still comes once a year to my house to cut Simon’s hair.

  Simon’s days at Ashdown could not have been described without the enthusiasm and the superb memory of the ex-headmaster Clive Williams, and the kindness and courage of one of Simon’s former (but by no means worst, Simon assures me) bullies, Malcolm Russell.

  For information about Simon’s days at Eton I am most indebted to William Waldegrave (now provost of the school) and to one of Simon’s mathematics teachers there, Dr. Norman Routledge. Colin and Carlyn Chisholm were also helpful, though their information (including the story about Simon cutting his hair, removing too much, and trying to stick it back on with Sellotape) came too late to include in the manuscript. I hope to change that for the paperback.

  Nick Wedd and Dr. Geoff Smith (who lives in a house called Dunsummin and is a former leader of the British Mathematics Olympiad team) provided essential information about the International Mathematics Olympiad and the childhoods of mathematical prodigies.

  For their anecdotes and observations about Simon as a mathematician at Cambridge, his genius, the Atlas project, backgammon in the Common Room, the delightful and peculiar behavior of mathematicians in general and the Monster and Moonshine: Professor John Horton Conway, Dr. Larissa Queen, Dr. Richard Parker, Professor John McKay, Professor Koichiro Harada, Dr. Ian Grojnowski (also for his top-up lesson in Group Theory, in the tea room of the LRB Bookshop), Professor Robert Curtis, Professor Bernard Silverman, Dr. John Duncan, Professor Richard Borcherds, Professor Rob Wilson, Amanda Stagg and Dr. Ruth Williams.

  Umar Salam and Dr. Graeme Mitcheson: their recommendations about how to deal with the mathematics of Group Theory, and their eagle eye for mathematical and non-mathematical errors and Cambridge misrepresentations, were invaluable.

  Dr. Wajid Mannan walked across Hyde Park to my house to teach me, with patience, charm and clarity, the little I now know about how Group Theory leads to the Monster. Also, the Open University, for the excellence of its mathematics courses in Group Theory and the dedication and expertise of its tutors—I am en route to becoming its most sluggish MSc student, but this astonishing organization remains forever supportive and willing to welcome me back. While on the subject of institutions, thank you also to the NHS, because it is wonderful.

  Grandmaster Ray Keene explained Simon’s talent and (more interesting) his inabilities at chess. Peter Donovan and Nicholas Davidson, Simon’s brilliance at bridge.

  Simon has got through a vast number of tenants during his time as a landlord in Cambridge. Andrew and Anabel Turtle, Harriet Snape, Aubrey de Grey (now well known as a “gerontologist” who believes we can live until we’re a thousand years old), and the late Andrew Plater and Mark Offord (Simon’s current tenant, in my old rooms) have each been helpful with stories and observations. Marianna Vintiadis reminded me of dozens of anecdotes, and analyzed them in cleverer ways than I could have managed.

  Siobhan Roberts—without her energy, and her determination to get all the Atlas editors together for her forthcoming biography of John Conway (in which Simon will also appear, for certain), I would not have been able to write Chapter 32.

  During the writing of this book, I stayed in the late Joyce Rathbone’s house in Notting Hill. Though we never met, I have spent so long working beside her piano and her books that I pray some of her spirit rubbed off on me. Her goddaughter Pippa Harris was an extraordinarily generous landlady. Thank you also to Diana Berry both for her Eton contacts and for letting me use her flat in Wiltshire in the last summer of writing, when I needed a place to weep, scream and stomp; and to “Basic Dog” (Gracie) for calming my nerves by chasing anything I kicked. And to Belinda and Diana Allan, for use of their glorious house in Italy. Reading this list, I see I am a sponger.

  For typing up the tapes and digital recordings of interviews, I and my hands are indebted to Clare Sproston, Ophelia Field (both of wh
om gave stern advice when I was sounding ridiculous or professionally incompetent) and Denise Knowelden.

  Peter Straus, my agent: for his encouragement, shrewd ideas about how to present the book, and his lack of fuss. Without him there would be no contract and therefore no comfort. And Jennifer Hewson, for her constant enthusiasm and helpfulness. Nicholas Pearson, my editor at Fourth Estate in England, for his calm and patience (and excellent taste); Robert Lacey, for his unmatchable copyediting and proofreading. In America, my editors Beth Rashbaum (whose intolerance of whimsy and pages of critique improved the style in several important sections) and Ryan Doherty, and my agent George Lucas.

  Thank you to my splendid and inspiring mother, Joan Brady.

  And, with my love, thank you to Flora Dennis. In our endless discussions about Simon and the manuscript, Flora’s fierce fight against inconsistencies, pomposities, obscurities (especially in the mathematical sections), ponderosities, purplifications, narcissisms and irrelevances has saved the story countless times. It has taken me five years to write this book, and—from Kerala to Great Snoring, Norfolk—Flora has made each one of them joyful.

  Further Reading

  Good Books for Group Theory and Symmetry,

  and Mathematical Inspiration

  There are hundreds. The trick with mathematics books is to play the field. A style that one reader finds clear, evocative and memorable can be turgid, fussy or superficial for the next. Any determined Group Theory novice should have at least ten or fifteen introductory books on the subject, none of which they read thoroughly. I began my mathematics again with an old school text: Bostock, Chandler and Rourke, Further Pure Mathematics, which gives a straightforward, concise introduction to the basic ideas of Group Theory and the formal ways to represent them (i.e., not by squares with arms and legs, or triangles wearing bloomers). After that, rummage the bookshops and libraries. You need to be able to investigate the book close-up before you buy it. Conway has just published The Symmetries of Things, which looks exceptionally clear and entertaining—I’m about to start it. Fearless Symmetry by Avner Ash and Robert Gross is superb: casual, reflective, a balance between easy-to-read prose and mathematical exercises, it is an attempt to guide the reader toward a feel for Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Books like this are triumphs of intelligence and good humor. My original plan for this book was to use a similar approach, teaching myself the mathematics of the Monster and Moonshine along the way. I soon gave up. The Schaum Outline series (usually so good) is fussy, stilted and over-technical on Group Theory. I found Joe Rosen’s Symmetry Discovered: Concepts and Applications in Nature and Science essential. It made me understand why the concept of symmetry is so important in science, when the world science is attempting to describe is, as anyone can see, blatantly asymmetrical.

  Simon recommends Marshall Hall’s Theory of Groups. He calls it “introductory.” It looks terrifying. For his other mathematical interests he suggests On Numbers and Games (by John Conway) and Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays (Berlekamp, Conway and Guy), both classic texts that include mathematical discoveries by Simon.

  Popular and recreational mathematics books are sometimes easy to understand but often not mathematically trivial, and they give Simon “new ideas to work on.” He admires all those by Martin Gardner and Ian Stewart, Raymond Smullyan (“particularly his exposition of combinatory logic, To Mock a Mockingbird—if you don’t know what combinatory logic is, don’t worry—you’ll find out!”) and Tracking the Automatic Ant, by David Gale. Prime Obsession is another good example of popular mathematics, by the cultural journalist and novelist John Derbyshire. Written for “the intelligent and curious but non-mathematical reader,” it has given Simon “a good insight into what the Riemann Hypothesis is all about.” Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra provides an excellent introduction to the development of Simon’s subject. It is just what a popular mathematics book should be: gentle, chatty, anecdotal, and full of mind-aching problems.

  At the time of going to press, the editors have banned “From Sex to Quadratic Forms” as the title of Simon’s paper on the mathematics of socks, which is due out later this year, in Invitation to Mathematics. They propose “From Gender to Quadratic Forms” instead. (“Which I think is appalling.”)

  Good Books About Public Transport

  Simon suggests one: Transport for Suburbia by Paul Mees. “I can’t think of any other book that has been of comparable importance to my thinking. It has launched me into a campaign to secure a Swiss-style transport system in Britain.”

  The books that guide Simon’s broader political interests and campaign work include: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (“After reading it I predicted that the banking crisis would provide an opportunity for right-wing governments to do their worst”), Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs, and Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee; Guns, Germs, and Steel; and Collapse.

  Simon’s campaign newsletter can be found at www.cambsbettertransport.org.uk. At the time of going to press, he’s a little behind the times. The latest edition is from last year, titled “Free Live Burials!” By cutting local bus services, Cambridge County Council is giving Cambridgeshire people “the privilege of being confined within their own homes, in some cases forever.” Simon also has a regular (six-monthly) column in the Bus Users UK Magazine (www.bususers.org, and click on the picture of the magazine). Also, Rail Magazine: “I have had letters published therein.”

  Details of Simon’s annual £10,000 Sheila McKechnie Foundation Award for improving public transport access are at www.smk.org.uk/transport/.

  Simon also contributes occasional letters (some of which can be read online) to the Independent, the Guardian, the Camden New Journal and Wordways, a magazine of recreational linguistics.

  Also by Alexander Masters

  Stuart: A Life Backwards