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Richard Borcherds, Mathematician

I was in Kashmir. I had been traveling around northern India, and there was one really long tiresome bus journey, which lasted about 24 hours. Then the bus had to stop because there was a landslide and we couldn't go any further. It was all pretty darn unpleasant. Anyway, I was just toying with some calculations on this bus journey and finally I found an idea which made everything work.

It's a bit like maybe trying to solve a crossword puzzle, except that instead of spending ten minutes on it, you're spending ten years on it.

Richard Borcherds

Books@Amazon.com

Internet Resources

Fields Medallist: Interview with Richard Borcherds

http://simonsingh.net/Fields_Medallist.html

http://iolfree.ie/~alexandros/articles/borchers.htm

Borcherds has proved the so-called 'moonshine conjecture', one of the most abstract and esoteric achievements imaginable. His work virtually defies explanation, which means that everybody knows that he is brilliant, but nobody understands why.

Simon Singh

Making mad, passionate maths

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/164861.stm

Professor Borcherds' work is concerned with a purely mathematical and unimaginable object that lives in 196,883 dimensions. It's called the Monster.

Dominic Hughes

Professor of Mathematics (Excerpt from The Essential Difference)

http://leitl.org/docs/a-professor-of-mathematics.pdf

Despite his facility with anything mathematical, Richard was puzzled byhis sense of alienation from people. He found people to be complex, mysterious beings who were hard to comprehend because they did not conformto the laws of physics or math.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Richard Borcherds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Borcherds

Born in Cape Town and educated at Cambridge, where he studied under John Horton Conway. After receiving his doctorate he has held various positions at Cambridge and at UC Berkeley, where he is currently a professor of mathematics.

Wikipedia

Richard E. Borcherds

http://math.berkeley.edu/~reb/

Preprints, papers and thesis.

University of California, Department of Mathematics

UC Berkeley professor wins highest honor in mathematics, the prestigious Fields Medal

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/98legacy/08-19-1998a.html

The (Monstrous Moonshine) conjecture presented two mathematical structures in a totally unexpected relationship. One of these structures is the so-called Monster Group, and the other is the theory of modular functions.

Robert Sanders

What is Moonshine? (A relatively short talk given at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Berlin, 1998)

http://math.berkeley.edu/~reb/papers/icm98/icm98.pdf

http://arxiv.org/pdf/math.QA/9809110.pdf?front

Every finite simple group either fits into one of about 20 infinite families, or is one of 26 exceptions, called sporadic simple groups. The monster simple group is the largest of the sporadic finite simple groups

Richard Borcherds

Work of R.E. Borcherds (Laudation delivered at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin)

http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/math.QA/9808136

Displaying penetrating insight, formidable technique and brilliant originality, Borcherds has used the beautiful properties of some exceptional structures to motivate new algebraic theories of great power...

Peter Goddard

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