Physics Research Conference

Explorations in the Physics and Mathematics of Moonshine

Shamit Kachru, Professor of Physics, Stanford University,

"Monstrous moonshine" is a beautiful phenomenon first discovered in the 1980s, providing startling and unexpected relations between several fundamental objects in mathematics and the physics of a (rather peculiar) string theory. Very recently, physicists and mathematicians have started to uncover evidence of deep analogous "moonshine" connections between some of the more physically interesting solutions to string theory and important structures in group theory and number theory. In this talk, I describe in an elementary way some of the fundamental mathematical and physical objects implicated in the moonshine conjectures, and the surprising and as yet mysterious connections between them.

Event Sponsors:

Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy - More events from this Sponsor

For more information, please contact Sheri Stoll by phone at 395-6608 or by email at [email protected] or visit http://www.pma.caltech.edu/~physcoll/PhysColl.html.