Event time:
Friday, October 8, 2010 - 9:00am to 10:00am
Location:
215LOM
Speaker:
Rishi Raj
Speaker affiliation:
Yale University
Event description:
The Monster is a finite simple group that has some remarkable and mysterious relationships with the theory of modular forms. These relationships are established using an infinite-dimensional representation of the Monster, called the Moonshine module, that was constructed by Frenkel-Lepowsky-Meurman in 1984. In my talk, I will briefly sketch the F-L-M construction. Then I will discuss Witten’s recent (2007) proposal, relating the Moonshine module to three-dimensional quantum gravity, which may lead to a new construction of the
Moonshine module.