Upper bounds for modular forms, lattices, and codes (Q1219867)

After \textit{J. H. Conway} [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 61, 398--400 (1968; Zbl 0186.32401); Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 1, 79--88 (1969; Zbl 0186.32304)] found a new sporadic simple group from the Leech lattice, there arose the possibility that infinitely many new simple groups might be found in the same way. The present paper shows that in one sense this is impossible, by showing that there are not infinitely many even unimodular lattices with smallest nonzero squared length equal to \(2[n/24] + 2\), where \(n\) is the dimension. Similar results hold for modular forms and for binary and ternary error-correcting codes. Thus for any constant \(b\), there are only finitely many binary self-dual codes with all weights divisible by 4 and minimum distance at least \(n/6 - b\). This paper is a sequel to \textit{C. L. Mallows} and \textit{N. J. A. Sloane} [Inf. Control 22, 188--200 (1973; Zbl 0254.94011)].