What is moonshine?

Finite simple groups are the building blocks of finite symmetry. The effort to classify them precipitated the discovery of new examples, including the monster, and six pariah groups which do not belong to any of the natural families, and are not involved in the monster. It also precipitated monstrous moonshine, which is an appearance of monster symmetry in number theory that catalysed developments in mathematics and physics. Forty years ago the pioneers of moonshine asked if ...

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The "Millennium Prize Problems" have a place in the history of mathematics. Here we tell some little-known anecdotes from the perspective of the planner of that project. These stories are far from their end; more likely they are just at their beginning.

We consider orbifoldings of the Moonshine Module with respect to the abelian group generated by a pair of commuting Monster group elements with one of prime order $p=2,3,5,7$ and the other of order $pk$ for $k=1$ or $k$ prime. We show that constraints arising from meromorphic orbifold conformal field theory allow us to demonstrate that each orbifold partition function with rational coefficients is either constant or is a hauptmodul for an explicitly found modular fixing group...

We consider the application of Abelian orbifold constructions in Meromorphic Conformal Field Theory (MCFT) towards an understanding of various aspects of Monstrous Moonshine and Generalised Moonshine. We review some of the basic concepts in MCFT and Abelian orbifold constructions of MCFTs and summarise some of the relevant physics lore surrounding such constructions including aspects of the modular group, the fusion algebra and the notion of a self-dual MCFT. The FLM Moonshin...

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Using predictions in mirror symmetry, C\u{a}ld\u{a}raru, He, and Huang recently formulated a "Moonshine Conjecture at Landau-Ginzburg points" for Klein's modular $j$-function at $j=0$ and $j=1728.$ The conjecture asserts that the $j$-function, when specialized at specific flat coordinates on the moduli spaces of versal deformations of the corresponding CM elliptic curves, yields simple rational functions. We prove this conjecture, and show that these rational functions arise ...

Generalised moonshine is reviewed from the point of view of holomorphic orbifolds, putting special emphasis on the role of the third cohomology group H^3(G, U(1)) in characterising consistent constructions. These ideas are then applied to the case of Mathieu moonshine, i.e. the recently discovered connection between the largest Mathieu group M_24 and the elliptic genus of K3. In particular, we find a complete list of twisted twining genera whose modular properties are control...

This paper collects some problems that I have encountered during the years, have puzzled me and which, to the best of my knowledge, are still open. Most of them are well-known and have been first stated by other authors. In this sad season of lockdown, I modestly try to contribute to scientific interaction at a distance. Therefore all comments and exchange of information are most welcome.