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A moonshine dialogue in mathematical physics. (English) Zbl 1328.01071

Summary: Phys and Math are two colleagues at the University of Saçenbon (Crefan Kingdom), dialoguing about the remarkable efficiency of mathematics for physics. They talk about the notches on the Ishango bone and the various uses of psi in maths and physics; they arrive at dessins d’enfants, moonshine concepts, Rademacher sums and their significance in the quantum world. You should not miss their eccentric proposal of relating Bell’s theorem to the Baby Monster group. Their hyperbolic polygons show a considerable singularity/cusp structure that our modern age of computers is able to capture. Henri Poincaré would have been happy to see it.

MSC:

01A80 Sociology (and profession) of mathematics
22-03 History of topological groups
81-03 History of quantum theory
14H57 Dessins d’enfants theory
81Q05 Closed and approximate solutions to the Schrödinger, Dirac, Klein-Gordon and other equations of quantum mechanics
11Fxx Discontinuous groups and automorphic forms
81Txx Quantum field theory; related classical field theories
20D08 Simple groups: sporadic groups
11F20 Dedekind eta function, Dedekind sums
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References:

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