Geoffrey Mason

Ivan Penkov

Joseph A. Wolf

The Lie Theory Workshop, founded by Joe Wolf (UC, Berkeley), has been running for over two decades. At the beginning, the top universities in California and Utah hosted the meetings, which continue to run on a quarterly basis. Experts in representation theory/Lie theory from various parts of the US, Europe, Asia (China, Japan, Singapore, Russia), Canada, and South and Central America were routinely invited to give talks at these meetings. Nowadays, the workshops are also hosted at universities in Louisiana, Virginia, and Oklahoma. These Lie theory workshops have been sponsored by the NSF, noting the talks have been seminal in describing new perspectives in the field covering broad areas of current research. The contributors have all participated in these Lie theory workshops and include in this volume expository articles which will cover representation theory from the algebraic, geometric, analytic, and topological perspectives with also important connections to math physics. These survey articles, review and update the prominent seminal series of workshops in representation/Lie theory mentioned above, and reflects the widespread influence of those workshops in such areas as harmonic analysis, representation theory, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, number theory, and mathematical physics. Many of the contributors have had prominent roles in both the classical and modern developments of Lie theory and its applications.

Geometric and Analytic Methods

Developments and Retrospectives in Lie Theory

Chongying Dong

'One of the great legacies of the classification of the finite simple groups is the existence of the Monster $\ldots$. Work of Borcherds and Frenkel-Lepowsky-Meurman led to the notion of a vertex (operator) algebra, which was seen to be the same as the chiral algebras used by physicists in conformal field theory $\ldots$. The connections with physics have proven to be invaluable, and it seems likely that another branch of mathematics whose origins are eerily similar to those of moonshine - that is, elliptic cohomology - will turn out to be very relevant too' - from the Preface.This volume contains the proceedings of a Joint Summer Research Conference held at Mount Holyoke College in June 1994. As perhaps the first conference proceedings devoted exclusively to the subject known as 'Moonshine', this work contains something for many mathematicians and physicists. It features: results concerning the monster simple group and other simple groups; connections with elliptic cohomology; connections with 2-dimensional conformal field theory; the role of operads; and, connections with modular functions. ""Much of Moonshine, the Monster, and Related Topics"" features new results not available anywhere else.

Geoffrey Mason

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