Simon P. Norton

Simon Phillips Norton (1952 to 2019) was an English mathematician at Cambridge who worked on finite simple groups. Born into a Sephardi family of Iraqi descent, he was a King's Scholar at Eton, earned an external degree in pure mathematics from the University of London while still at school, and won gold medals for the United Kingdom at three consecutive International Mathematical Olympiads from 1967. He then studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and stayed in Cambridge to work on finite groups. He was one of the authors of the ATLAS of Finite Groups and constructed the Harada-Norton group. In 1979, together with John Conway, he proved a connection between the Monster group and the j-function in number theory that they named monstrous moonshine; Richard Borcherds later proved conjectures they made. He also made early discoveries in Conway's Game of Life and invented the game Snort. His eccentric life is the subject of the biography The Genius in My Basement by Alexander Masters. He died in 2019 aged 66.