The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

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      Simon was one year old, playing in the dining room, getting under his mother’s stilettos.

      He was unusually thoughtful. His brothers at this age pounded the toy blocks on the glass coffee table and jabbed them into the electric sockets.

      Simon picked up a pink block from the pile beside his knee and smoothed it against the carpet. Carefully, he positioned a blue brick alongside. He reached across – his mother, on her way to lay the side-plates and forks, had to make a sharp swerve – for two more pink bricks, and slid them against the blue. With precision, he extracted another blue brick.

      Shuffling across the room on his bottom, Simon found four more pink bricks, fumbled them back and continued the arrangement.

      His mother, halfway through folding napkins into bishops’ mitres, stopped in astonishment. She saw at last what he was doing.

      One blue, one pink.

      One blue, two pinks.

      One blue, three pinks.

      One blue, four pinks.

      From the disarray of Nature, her baby son was enforcing regularity.

      It took our species from the birth of prehistory to the dawn of Babylonian civilisation to learn mathematics.

      Simon was bumping about its foothills in just over twelve months.

      At three years, eleven months and twenty-six days, he toddled into cake-layers of long multiplication:

      (January 1956)

      Simon’s brother Francis had barely managed to recite the digits from one to ten by the time he was four years old; his brother Michael, a fraction quicker, had understood that if you gave him three banana-flavour milkshakes, and asked him to ‘count’ them, the correct answer was ‘one’ for the first, ‘two’ for the second and ‘three’ for the sticky splosh dribbling down his ear.

      Percentages, square numbers, factors, long division, his 81 and 91 times tables, making numbers dance about to itchy tunes:

      Simon mastered these when he was five.

      Occasionally, his attention wandered:

      2 The reader meets Simon

       Sschliissh, dhuunk, dhuunk, zwaap, dhuunk, zwaap …

      Listen! Can you hear?

       … dhuunk, sschliissh, dhuunk, zaap, zwap, dhuunk … Bend down. Put your ear against the carpet: Zwaap, dhuunk, dhuunk, dhuunk,

       zwaap, dhuunk, ssschliissh …

      It’s fifty years later.

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