John McKay (mathematician)

John KS McKay ( born June 16, 1939 in Kent ) is an English mathematician who deals with group theory.

McKay attended from 1958, the University of Manchester, where he worked on the early computers developed there, among others, and in 1970 received his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh at Walter Munn. In the 1960s he was at Caltech and then some years at McGill University in Canada and then went to Concordia University in Canada, where he is a professor today.

McKay is responsible for the discovery ( 1978) of the " Monstrous Moonshine " is known, the remarkable connection of the representations of the largest simple group, the Monster, and the Fourier- opment coefficients of the elliptic modular function, all of which are linear combinations of the degrees of irreducible representations of the Monster group:

With. McKay noticed that 196 884 the dimension of the Griess algebra, which is one greater than the dimension of the smallest representation of the Monster group.

The Moonshine properties have been studied by John Conway, Simon Norton and Richard Borcherds ( in 1998, later received the Fields Medal for proving the conjecture ).

He was also involved in the construction of some sporadic simple finite groups, so on the Hero Group with Graham Higman.

Another conjecture of McKay is the McKay correspondence between the Coxeter - Dynkin diagrams of Lie algebras of the type and the irreducible representations of the finite subgroups of (ie, the three-dimensional rotation group ) or their dual overlay

His work has been honored at a conference in his honor from Concordia University with the University of Montreal in April 2007. In 2000 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2003 he received the CRM -Fields Prize of the Canadian mathematical research institute Centre de Recherches Mathématiques.

Writings

  • With Abdellah Sebbar: Replicable functions, an introduction, in Pierre Cartier, among others Frontiers in Number Theory, Physics and Geometry, Volume 2, Springer Verlag 2007
J-invariant Simon P. Norton CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize Integrated Authority File
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