Related papers: The Jack Daniels Problem

Jing Run Chen proved in 1966 that $p+2$ has at most two prime factors for infinitely many primes $p$. However, due to the parity problem we do not know whether $p+2$ has an odd (or even) number of prime factors infinitely often. In the…

The commencement of monstrous moonshine is a connection between the largest sporadic simple group---the monster---and complex elliptic curves. Here we explain how a closer look at this connection leads, via the Thompson group, to recently…

In this paper, we introduce and study a variant of Kummer's notion of (ir)regularity of primes which we call G-irregularity. It is based on Genocchi numbers $G_n$, rather than Bernoulli number $B_n.$ We say that an odd prime $p$ is…

In this paper, we propose a conjectural formula for the order of the poles of intertwining operators in the context of the representation theory of general linear groups over $p$-adic fields. More specifically, we conjecturally relate the…

Let p > 2 be prime. We prove the weight part of Serre's conjecture for rank two unitary groups for mod p representations in the unramified case (that is, the Buzzard-Diamond-Jarvis conjecture for unitary groups), by proving that any Serre…

One would like an explanation of the provocative McKay and Glauberman-Norton observations connecting the extended $E_8$-diagram with pairs of 2A involutions in the Monster sporadic simple group. We propose a down-to-earth model for the…

A famous conjecture of Parkin-Shanks predicts that $p(n)$ is odd with density $1/2$. Despite the remarkable amount of work of the last several decades, however, even showing this density is positive seems out of reach. In a 2018 paper with…

The equality between the number of odd spin structures on a Riemann surface of genus g, with $2^g - 1$ being a Mersenne prime, and the even perfect numbers, is an indication that the action of the modular group on the set of spin structures…

In this talk we consider the relationship between the conjectured uniqueness of the Moonshine module of Frenkel, Lepowsky and Meurman and Monstrous Moonshine, the genus zero property for Thompson series discovered by Conway and Norton. We…

Moment problems and orthogonal polynomials, both meant in a single real variable, belong to the oldest problems in Classical Analysis. They have been developing for over a century in two parallel, mostly independent streams. During the last…

Plane partition diamonds were introduced by Andrews, Paule, and Riese (2001) as part of their study of MacMahon's $\Omega$-operator in search for integer partition identities. More recently, Dockery, Jameson, Sellers, and Wilson (2024)…

We make many new observations on primitive roots modulo primes. For an odd prime $p$ and an integer $c$, we establish a theorem concerning $\sum_g(\frac{g+c}p)$, where $g$ runs over all the primitive roots modulo $p$ among $1,\ldots,p-1$,…

Eguchi, Ooguri, and Tachikawa recently conjectured a new moonshine phenomenon. They conjecture that the coefficients of a certain mock modular form H(tau), which arises from the K3 surface elliptic genus, are sums of dimensions of…

In this paper, we prove that if two finite groups G and H have isomorphic Burnside rings, then G and H are the same order type groups, and give an example to show that the Burnside rings of the same order type groups are not necessarily…

The Schinzel Hypothesis is a celebrated conjecture in number theory linking polynomial values and prime numbers. In the same vein we investigate the common divisors of values $P_1(n),\ldots, P_s(n)$ of several polynomials. We deduce this…

Let \chi be an irreducible character of the finite group G. If g is an element of G and \chi(g) is not zero, then we conjecture that the order of g divides |G|/\chi(1). The conjecture is a generalization of the classical fact that…

An outstanding problem in statistical mechanics is the order parameter of the chiral Potts model. An elegant conjecture for this was made in 1983. It has since been successfully tested against series expansions, but as far as the author is…

For finite groups $G$, we show that bosonic-fermionic coinvariant rings have a natural $U(\mathfrak{gl}(k|j)) \otimes \mathbb{C}[G]$-module structure. In particular, we show that their character series are a sum of super Schur functions…

A new conjecture on characters of finite groups, related to the McKay conjecture, was proposed recently by the first and third authors. In this paper, we prove it for $p$-solvable groups when $p$ is odd.

Consider a totally ordered set $S$ of $n$ elements; as an example, a set of tennis players and their rankings. Further assume that their ranking is a total order and thus satisfies transitivity and anti-symmetry. Following Frances Yao…