This is a quirky, entertaining, fascinating, and fairly complex extended biographical essay written by a young Brit who lived in Cambridge, England in a house owned by a very strange man.  Simon Norton had been hailed as a young mathematics genius when as a teen he won the International Math Olympiad with perfect scores on three occasions. He went to Eton and got a First at University of London while doing his high school work and then proceeded to Cambridge for a PhD as well as a faculty position in an outstanding math department. He did groundbreaking work on Group Theory, the study of symmetry as well as developing an Atlas of the Monster and the Monstrous Moonshine work, all of which was quite beyond me as well as slightly beyond Alex. About 35 years ago, however, Cambridge chose not to renew his contract and Simon virtually disappeared, living in his basement in OCD squalor and spending all of his time and money on public transportation, riding the buses and trains and haranguing the public officials responsible for cutbacks and reductions in service. Masters spends hours (? years) trying to get to Norton’s core, and when he does, he finds a man who takes delight in his life, who ignores the rest of the world, and who continues to make important contributions to math. Norton has not “gone mad” or “disappeared,” he’s simply redirected his thinking to those things that delight him—riding public transportation and finding the patterns in numbers which explain the universe. I identified a lot with Simon’s foibles though not his brains.