| ▲ | seanhunter 5 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist. He is probably most well known for proving the “Monstrous Moonshine” conjecture of Conway and Norton that there is some sort of correspondence between modular functions and representations of the Monster Group. When the conjecture was made in the 1970s, it was purely because someone noticed that a certain number was the same as the cardinality of the monster group. It seemed a crazy coincidence, so John H Conway said (playfully) that it was “Moonshine”. Hence the name “Monstrous Moonshine”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | alkyon an hour ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Thanks for mentioning this. I just realized that the Monster Group has approximately as many elements as the Earth has atoms (|MG| ~ 8*10^53) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | rfgplk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> As an aside, the professor in question is Richard Borcherds, fields medalist. I get what you're saying but credentialism of this kind has literally zero meaning today. For instance restating your opening sentence as "As an aside, the professor in question is Johnny Doe, with access to 100+ unrestricted Mythos agents" sounds far more credible and intimidating at this point. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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