monstrous moonshine

tonight i left the house.  it took me a day and a half to work up to leaving, but whining cats who were sick to death of scrambled eggs finally forced me to find my car keys.  and boy howdy, i am glad for that tricky car ride. after mad cat and trader joe's (lots of pre-prepared microwavable meals--don't judge), i headed home.  the npr show was about neighbors, and the first segment was about jeffrey dahmer's childhood neighbor.  the guy was kind of an asshole.  so i was only half way listening.   thennnn....

first off, the noises:  shhhhwish, dumm, dumm, dop...shhhwish, dumm, dumm, dop. shhhwish, shhhwish, hissssss.  i make noises.  when i am doing something rhythmic, i like to accompany the movements with appropriate sounds.  (you probably do this too, but you are just too embarrassed to admit it.)  the sounds drew me in.

the book is about the washed-up mathematical genius living on tinned mackerel and ramen in the basement of his own home.  (he rents out the upper house part of the house.)  the author just happened to move into the house.  later he found out that his landlord was the brilliant math guy, simon p. norton.  who?  right?

here's what matters:  the guy wrote about MONSTROUS MOONSHINE!  how's that for some math genius?

according to wikipedia:

(feel free to skip this explanation unless you want a headache.)

In mathematics, monstrous moonshine, or moonshine theory, is a term devised by John Conway and Simon P. Norton in 1979, used to describe the unexpected connection between the monster group M and modular functions, in particular, the j function. It is now known that lying behind monstrous moonshine is a certain conformal field theory having the Monster group as symmetries. The conjectures made by Conway and Norton were proved by Richard Borcherds in 1992 using the no-ghost theorem from string theory and the theory of vertex operator algebras and generalized Kac–Moody algebras.

huh?  well anyway, i did find out that it is called monstrous moonshine because " blah blah blah, that's moonshine" and if you can figure out "blah, blah, blah, i'll give you a bottle of jack daniels".  read more about it on wikipedia--and donate while you are there.

and read the book by alexander masters called simon--the genius in my basement.  when you are finished, give me a call and we can chat over whisky and discuss string theory and knitting and such.