Haha, I think I know who that is; they were in my cohort. They had other problems in their life and I think have had trouble getting on their feet. It doesn't help that they didn't stay in NYC/SF upon completion and instead moved back to podunk, where there aren't as many tech jobs.
I actually applied to work with Brooke a couple years ago, and I probably still have the Craigslist post saved.
The original ad was posted with the title "If you enjoy mathematics, no prior work experience needed" and a really intriguing body that alluded to interesting work that they'd train you on. He asked if we had any questions for him, if we could get to his office (i.e. were in commuting range), what was interesting about us, and finally asked for a brief summary of our work/schooling. He specifically didn't ask for resumes, although a lot of people sent them to him (and then dressed for the open house in a suit, lol) because of how ingrained the standard motions of hiring are among candidates.
He followed up to every email with a personal response where he sounded like a human being, and then told candidates that there'd be an open house and then we could decide if we wanted to keep on in the process.
I imagine some people shied away because of the time commitment of learning what we could about a new, weird language over a week, and there were some things that didn't work very well because of how different his hiring process was from the norm, but it was enriching and fun in the end.
The big thing that might have worked in Brooke's favor was that this all took place in 2011, when the job market was even worse than it is now.
From my recollection of topology, finite spaces are mostly useful as demonstrations or counter-examples. So, to illustrate a point about why something isn't true, you might break out a finite space to provide an easy-to-understand means of grasping the counter-example (there's an entire book called Counterexamples in Topology for this purpose).
"Real work" in topology generally involves infinite spaces, though.
Really smart person, but some serious issues.