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Thursday, March 21, 2024

Posted January 20, 2024
Last modified February 5, 2024

Colloquium Questions or comments?

3:30 pm – 4:20 pm Lockett 232

Chongying Dong, UC Santa Cruz
Monstrous moonshine and orbifold theory

This introductory talk will survey the recent development of the monstrous moonshine. Conjectured by McKay-Thompson-Conway-Norton and proved by Borcherds, the moonshine conjecture reveals a deep connection between the largest sporadic finite simple group Monster and genus zero functions. From the point of view of vertex operator algebra, moonshine is a connection among finite groups, vertex operator algebras and modular forms. This talk will explain how the moonshine phenomenon can be understood in terms of orbifold theory.