Shamit Kachru, Professor of Physics, Stanford University
"Monstrous moonshine" is a beautiful phenomenon first discovered in the 1980s, providing startling and unexpected relations between several fundamental objects in mathematics and the physics of a (rather peculiar) string theory. Very recently, physicists and mathematicians have started to uncover evidence of deep analogous "moonshine" connections between some of the more physically interesting solutions to string theory and important structures in group theory and number theory. In this talk, I describe in an elementary way some of the fundamental mathematical and physical objects implicated in the moonshine conjectures, and the surprising and as yet mysterious connections between them.