Monstrous moonshine

This is an expository talk on the monstrous moonshine conjectures about the monster simple group in mathematics.

[mialiang]

WhY arent more people watching this video its literally by the dude who proved the monstrous moonshine conjecture and won the friggin fields medal for it😂

[ayadav]

Thank you dear professor.
I am a surgeon. I was bitten by the math bug last year due to stalwarts like you. Thanks for making me see beauty again in formal education.

[MichaelTiemann]

Thank you for this guided tour of your amazing work!

[PopeLando]

Every time he's about to clearly and unambiguously explain something in a way the rest of us non-mathematicians could understand, his voice cuts out.

[felipelopes]

Thanks a lot, Prof. Borcherds! I actually found your explanation of vertex algebras very useful, because I know quantum field theory, and could relate the axioms to the operator product expansion!

[john-r-edge]

This is a great talk, thanks for your effort. FYI there are some short sections where the audio track becomes distorted, and one or two where words cannot be understood. Its accessibility would be helped by subtitles to cover those sections.

[jonathanbush]

Thumbs up for content, but the audio flakes out in spots and the contrast (i.e. legibility) of the text could have been better.

[shanathered]

about the algebra product, though. there are a few more identities involving the inner product. and when two vectors alternate as a(ac) = (aa)c. then all possible vectors b associate like a(bc) = (ab)c. in other words, alternativity implies associativity.

[topquark]

This monstrous moonshine stuff is really fascinating. I'm just trying to find the connection to sqrt(163) and the fine structure constant ε0 in physics. Someone mentioned it to me, but I can't recall the details. Borcherds might know more about it.

[prakashpanangaden]

Would have been a great talk, but the slides are out of focus. It was in focus for the first few seconds and then the focus suddenly changes and nothing can be read.

[diribigal]

Using R for the group acting on a ring is a little confusing.

[shanathered]

Umbral moonshine actually was proven rather recently, I believe.

[chrisbiddle]

Hello smart people. If you understand this video I sincerely hope you are being paid well because I can’t imagine how many courses in math you’ve had to pay for

[amaarquadri]

It's amazing how string theory has actually had mathematical implications!

[IsaacBroudy]

Thank you for this amazing talk. Do you have books you would recommend to learn more?

[Skybrg]

I got through the entire video, thought it was interesting, then months later watched the Numberphile video on the Monster group. "Hmm, that name 'Richard Borcherds' seems familiar"...

[transfo]

Richard da 🐐 no 🧢 (Seriously though, Prof. Borcherds is one of the most influential mathematician of the present age.)

[moraigna]

If I watch the series on Group Theory, will I understand everything here?

[erufailon]

Hi. Does there exist a mapping of a set of Monster symmetries to those that are compatible with Calabi-Yau manifolds? I'm wondering if any symmetry relations that exist in M might manifest in lower dimensions, some subgroup of M, as (at least roughly) symmetries of the Standard Model and/or those of spacetime? We've got this beautiful, complex group that exists and touches so many branches of maths, makes me wonder how much it and it mysteries might manifest.

[madvoice]

This is the 5 minutes problem, I am serious