November 23, 2015
4:15 p.m. in #1 Le Conte Hall
Physics
Department
Colloquium
Dr. Shamit Kachru
Professor of Physics
Stanford University
“Explorations in the Physics and
Mathematics of Moonshine”
“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.