Simon Phillips Norton is a mathematician in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

, England, who works on finite simple group

Simple group

In mathematics, a simple group is a nontrivial group whose only normal subgroups are the trivial group and the group itself. A group that is not simple can be broken into two smaller groups, a normal subgroup and the quotient group, and the process can be repeated...

s. He constructed the Harada–Norton group, and in 1979 together with John Conway

John Horton Conway

John Horton Conway is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory...

 proved there is a connection between the Monster group

Monster group

In the mathematical field of group theory, the Monster group M or F1 is a group of finite order:...

 and the j-function

J-invariant

In mathematics, Klein's j-invariant, regarded as a function of a complex variable τ, is a modular function defined on the upper half-plane of complex numbers.We haveThe modular discriminant \Delta is defined as \Delta=g_2^3-27g_3^2...

 in number theory. They dubbed this monstrous moonshine

Monstrous moonshine

In mathematics, monstrous moonshine, or moonshine theory, is a term devised by John Horton Conway and Simon P. Norton in 1979, used to describe the connection between the monster group M and modular functions .- History :Specifically, Conway and Norton, following an initial observationby John...

 and made some conjectures, later proved by Richard Borcherds

Richard Borcherds

Richard Ewen Borcherds is a British mathematician specializing in lattices, number theory, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebras. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.- Personal life :...

. Norton was one of the authors of the ATLAS of Finite Groups

ATLAS of Finite Groups

The ATLAS of Finite Groups, often simply known as the ATLAS, is a group theory book by John Horton Conway, Robert Turner Curtis, Simon Phillips Norton, Richard Alan Parker and Robert Arnott Wilson , published in December 1985 by Oxford University Press and reprinted with corrections in 2003...

. He also made several early discoveries in Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970....

, and invented the game Snort.

Norton is the subject of the biography The Genius In My Basement (ISBN 9780007243389), written by Norton's Cambridge neighbour, author Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters is an author, screenwriter, and worker with the homeless. He lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom.Masters is the son of authors Dexter Masters and Joan Brady. He was educated at Bedales School, and took a first in physics from King's College London...

.

External links

• Simon Norton at the Cambridge mathematics department
• Simon Norton at LifeWiki
• "The genius who lives downstairs", Alexander Masters
  Alexander Masters
  Alexander Masters is an author, screenwriter, and worker with the homeless. He lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom.Masters is the son of authors Dexter Masters and Joan Brady. He was educated at Bedales School, and took a first in physics from King's College London...
  
  , The Guardian
  The Guardian
  The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
  
  , 19 August 2011 (an extract from The Genius In My Basement)