III.61 The Monster Group


THE CLASSIFICATION OF FINITE SIMPLE GROUPS [V.7] is one of the landmarks of twentieth-century mathematics. As its name suggests, it gives a complete description of all finite simple groups, which can be thought of as the building blocks for all finite groups. It states that each finite simple group belongs to one of eighteen infinite families, or else is one of twenty-six “sporadic” examples. The Monster group is the largest of these sporadic groups, with 808 017 424 794 512 875 886 459 904 961 710 757 005 754 368 000 000 000 elements.

As well as having a starring role in the classification theorem, the Monster group has remarkable and deep connections with other areas of mathematics. Most notably, the smallest dimension of a faithful REPRESENTATION [IV.9] of the Monster group is 196 883, while the coefficient of e2πiz in the important and famous “elliptic modular function” (see ALGEBRAIC NUMBERS [IV.1 §8]) is 196 884. Far from being an amusing coincidence, the fact that these two numbers differ by just 1 is a manifestation of a very deep connection between the two. See VERTEX OPERATOR ALGESRAS [IV.17 §4.2] for further details.


The Navier-Stokes Equation

See THE EULER AND NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS [III.23]


..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset