What is moonshine (Q5948245)

This is a nicely written version of the author's talk at the ICM in Berlin. He gives a vivid description of the origin of the term `monstrous moonshine' (relating to McKay's foolish ideas on rather weird relations between coefficients of the elliptic modular function and the representations of the monster and not to poetic terms). The early contributions of McKay, Conway, etc. are mentioned. The main emphasis is laid on \textit{P. Goddard}'s exposition of the proof of the Conway-Norton conjecture [see ibid. Vol. I, 99-108 (1998)], the relation with vertex algebras, generalized Kac-Moody algebras, Macdonald identities and completely replicable functions. Finally various extensions of the original moonshine conjectures are discussed.