Brief Review: Terry Gannon 'Moonshine Beyond the Monster'

Dcase

While perusing the 'Never Ending Book' Site, I came across this link to the Terry Gannon ArXiv paper 'Monstrous Moonshine: the first 25 years'.
http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0402/0402345.pdf

Lieven le Bruyn refers to this as a survey paper [33 pages with 124 references].
It appears to form the framework of the Gannon book, ‘Moonshine Beyond the Monster’ [477 pages, 575 references].

Gannon comprises a masterful effort relating modular forms, E8 and the Leech Lattice to the Monster and VOA for the complex-24D.

He explains the Cartan-like structure of Borcherds-Kac-Moody algebras.

He touches upon the concept of imaginary time for D26.

He does not appear to discuss the string-25D.

He relates Mathieu groups and the bi-monster as "mini-monster" and "maxi-monster", respectively, but does not address their apparent relation to Golay codes.

kneemo

A very nice find! Thanks. The paper and the references therein are very helpful.

Kea

Yeah, thanks, Dcase! Fantastic review. Somehow he manages to put

[tex]196 884 = 196 883 + 1[/tex]

on the second line. And over 6 pages of references!