
Moonshine Master Toys with String Theory - bdr
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160804-miranda-cheng-moonshine-string-theory/
======
mathgenius
From their paper:

""" According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a flame or light that is
lambent is playing “lightly upon or gliding over a surface without burning it,
like a ‘tongue of fire’; shining with a soft clear light and without fierce
heat.” And since the light of umbral moonshine is apparently of this nature,
we call the six values in Λ = {2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 13} lambent, and we refer to the
index ℓ ∈ Λ as the lambency of the connections relating the umbral group G(ℓ)
to the umbral forms Z(ℓ) and H(ℓ)g . """

That is some very fine literary influences indeed.

------
hyh1048576
The title makes me think it's talking about Richard Borcherds, who solved the
moonshine conjecture (and got the Fields Medal for that), and is now
interested in TQFT (topological quantum field theory).

However it's about Iris Cheng. I'm not saying she's not good or anything like
that, but how can the author call someone "moonshine master" while what
happened is "She happened to have read a book about the “monstrous
moonshine,”"?

~~~
danharaj
Probably because her CV [1] is full of uses of moonshine algebra. I'm sure
there's multiple mathematicians you could call a master of moonshine.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/a/cheng_m_1.html](https://arxiv.org/a/cheng_m_1.html)

~~~
77pt77
Homepage

[https://sites.google.com/site/mcheng0606/research](https://sites.google.com/site/mcheng0606/research)

------
jplasmeier
I took John Duncan's course on intro abstract algebra when I was a sophomore
at CWRU. I had signed up to take his class on modular forms the next semester
but he had been hired away before I had the chance to take it. A big shame as
he was one of the best professors I've had (nearly the entire course grade was
based on homework- exactly as it should be IMO).

