Related papers: A moonshine dialogue in mathematical physics
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
The establishment of extremely strong bounds on the magnitude of the electric dipole moment of the neutron, a quantity that is of great importance for determining the level of time reversal symmetry respected by the strong interactions,…
The essential role played by Chern--Simons terms in a variety of physical models provides yet another illustration of the unexpected but profound interactions between the two disciplines.
The role mathematics plays within physics has been of sustained interest for physicists as well as for philosophers and historians of science. We explore this topic by tracing the role the mathematical structure associated with SU(2) has…
Mathematics is the language of science. Fluent and productive use of mathematics requires one to understand the meaning embodied in mathematical symbols, operators, syntax, etc., which can be a difficult task. For instance, in algebraic…
Several decades ago, John McKay suggested a correspondence between nodes of the affine E8 Dynkin diagram and certain conjugacy classes in the Monster group. Thanks to Monstrous Moonshine, this correspondence can be recast as an assignment…
These notes provide an elementary (and incomplete) sketch of the objects and ideas involved in monstrous and umbral moonshine. They were the basis for a plenary lecture at the 18th International Congress on Mathematical Physics, and for a…
The concept of symmetries in physics is briefly reviewed. In the first part of these lecture notes, some of the basic mathematical tools needed for the understanding of symmetries in nature are presented, namely group theory, Lie groups and…
This paper is a celebration of the frontiers of science. Goodenough, the maestro who transformed energy usage and technology through the invention of the lithium ion battery, opens the programme, reflecting on the ultimate limits of battery…
Recently, a geometric embedding of the classical space and classical phase space of an n-particle system into the space of states of the system was constructed and shown to be physically meaningful. Namely, the Newtonian dynamics of the…
Monstrous moonshine relates distinguished modular functions to the representation theory of the monster. The celebrated observations that 196884=1+196883 and 21493760=1+196883+21296876, etc., illustrate the case of the modular function…
We provide a unified framework of Mahler measure, dessins d'enfants, and gauge theory. With certain physically motivated Newton polynomials from reflexive polygons, the Mahler measure and the dessin are in one-to-one correspondence. From…
After initially meeting with fierce resistance, "branes", p-dimensional extended objects which go beyond particles (p=0) and strings (p=1), now occupy centre stage in theoretical physics as microscopic components of M-theory, as the seeds…
In my lectures at the Les Houches Summer School 2008, I discussed central concepts of computational statistical physics, which I felt would be accessible to the very cross-cultural audience at the school. I started with a discussion of…
This thesis is devoted to studying various aspects of quantum mechanics on non-commutative space-time and to capture some of the surviving aspects of symmetries of quantum field theory on such space-time, illustrated through toy models in…
Can machine learning help discover new mathematical structures? In this article we discuss an approach to doing this which one can call "mathematical data science". In this paradigm, one studies mathematical objects collectively rather than…
I briefly review the arguments why the braneworld models with infinite-volume extra dimensions could solve the cosmological constant problem, evading Weinberg's no-go theorem. Then I discuss in detail the established properties of these…
The procedure used to "do physics" in the macroscopic world is familiar: You take an object, start it off with a particular position and velocity, subject it to known forces (say gravity or friction, or both), and follow its trajectory. You…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…