Postcards from the edge, or Snapshots of the theory of generalised Moonshine

These notes stem from lectures given by the first author (JM) at the 2008 "Moonshine Conference in Kashiwa" and contain a number of new perspectives and observations on Monstrous Moonshine. Because many new points have not appeared anywhere in print, it is thought expedient to update, annotate and clarify them (as footnotes), an editorial task which the second author (YHH) is more than delighted to undertake. We hope the various puzzles and correspondences, delivered in a per...

This is an informal write up of my talk in Berlin. It gives some background to Goddard's talk (math.QA/9808136) about the moonshine conjectures.

Phys and Math are two colleagues at the University of Sa{\c c}enbon (Crefan Kingdom), dialoguing about the remarkable efficiency of mathematics for physics. They talk about the notches on the Ishango bone, the various uses of psi in maths and physics, they arrive at dessins d'enfants, moonshine concepts, Rademacher sums and their significance in the quantum world. You should not miss their eccentric proposal of relating Bell's theorem to the Baby Monster group. Their hyperbol...

Monsters lurk within mathematical as well as literary haunts. I propose to trace some pathways between these two monstrous habitats. I start from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's influential account of monster culture and explore how well mathematical monsters fit each of his seven theses. The mathematical monsters I discuss are drawn primarily from three distinct but overlapping domains. Firstly, late nineteenth-century mathematicians made numerous unsettling discoveries that threaten...

These notes provide an elementary (and incomplete) sketch of the objects and ideas involved in monstrous and umbral moonshine. They were the basis for a plenary lecture at the 18th International Congress on Mathematical Physics, and for a lecture series at the Centre International de Recontres Mathematiques school on "Mathematics of String Theory."

An account of the subjective elements of quantum mechanics or of whether, as Einstein famously asked, the Moon exists when nobody is looking at it.

This is a structured compilation of some of my favourite open problems.

A content-free expository article about the monster simple group.

This is a revised version of the course notes handed to each participant at the limits of mathematics short course, Orono, Maine, June 1994.

For many years, I have been collecting math jokes and posting them on my website. I have more than 400 jokes there. In this paper, which is an extended version of my talk at the G4G15, I would like to present 66 of them.