Symmetry and the Monster

Mark Ronan is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was Visiting Professor of Mathematics at University College London, having held previous academic positions in Berlin, in Braunschweig, and in Birmingham where he was Mason Professor of Mathematics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his early career he worked on the fringes of the Classification program and knew personally all the main people involved in the modern part of this story. His work is now on geometric structures exhibiting symmetry, on which he has written numerous research papers and a textbook published by Academic Press in 1989. Besides mathematics, Mark reads Babylonian cuneiform and has a great love for music. He has acted in more than a dozen operas at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and danced in The Nutcracker.

Ronan unfolds his story with admirable verve and clarity... [His] exposition includes entertaining glimpses of the personalities involved in this extraordinary quest, but best of all gives an admirabe amount of detail concerning the actual substance of their work.

• Prologue ; 1. Theaetetus's Icosahedron ; 2. Galois: Death of a Genius ; 3. Irrational Solutions ; 4. Groups ; 5. Sophus Lie ; 6. Lie Groups and Physics ; 7. Going Finite ; 8. After the War ; 9. The Man from Uccle ; 10. The Big Theorum ; 11. Pandora's Box ; 12. The Leech Lattice ; 13. Fischer's Monsters ; 14. The Atlas ; 15. A Monstrous Mystery ; 16. Construction ; 17. Moonshine ; Appendix 1: The Golden Section ; Appendix 2: The Witt Design ; Appendix 3: The Leech Lattice ; Appendix4: The 26 Exceptions