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Monstrous Lie algebras and generalized moonshine

Special Events

Speaker: Scott Carnahan, UC Berkeley
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Mon, Dec 4 2006, 12:10PM

Moonshine arose from unexpected numerical relationships between modular functions on the complex upper half plane and the representation theory of the monster simple group. Since its birth in the 1970s, this field has been connected to many other areas of mathematics, including conformal field theory, algebraic topology. I will describe a construction of some infinite dimensional Lie algebras equipped with actions of large finite groups, and relate the resulting characters to Norton's generalized moonshine conjecture.

This is a special talk in the RFG seminar on applications of quantum algebra.