No label defined (Q4798660)

The paper under review is an exposition of three lectures given by the author in the Mathematical Department of the University of Coimbra in May 2001. The subject of the lectures was the ideas related to Borcherds proof, see [\textit{R. E. Borcherds}, Monstrous moonshine and monstrous Lie superalgebras, Invent. Math. 109, No. 2, 405--444 (1992; Zbl 0799.17014)], of the Conway-Norton ``monstrous moonshine conjecture'' from [\textit{J. H. Conway} and \textit{S. P. Norton}, Monstrous moonshine, Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 11, 308--339 (1979; Zbl 0424.20010)]. The author starts with a short introduction to the history of the question and its solution and then quickly goes into a detailed exposition, which contains the following chapters: generalities on finite simple groups and modular forms; connection between the modular forms and the representations of the monster group (the so-called McKay's observation); generalities on Kac-Moody Lie algebras and vertex algebras; the formulation of the original conjecture of Conway and Norton; description of the normalizers of some congruence subgroups of \(\text{SL}_2(\mathbb{R})\); generalities on Borcherds Lie algebras and the monster Lie algebra; usual and twisted denominator identities for Borcherds Lie algebras.