This is the proceedings of a Joint Summer Research Conference held at Mount Holyoke College in Jun 1994. As perhaps the first conference proceedings devoted exclusively to the subject known as "Moonshine", this work contains something for many mathematicians and physicists. Many of the results featured are not available elsewhere.

Thisseries is devoted to the publication of monographs, lecture resp. seminar notes, and other materials arising from programs of the OSU Mathemaical Research Institute. This includes proceedings of conferences or workshops held at the Institute, and other mathematical writings.

In an exciting, fast-paced historical narrative ranging across two centuries, Ronan takes readers on an exhilarating tour of this final mathematical quest to understand symmetry.

This volume is the proceedings of the Ramanujan International Symposium on Kac-Moody Lie algebras and their applications. The symposium provided researchers in mathematics and physics with the opportunity to discuss new developments in this rapidly-growing area of research. The book contains several excellent articles with new and significant results. It is suitable for graduate students and researchers working in Kac-Moody Lie algebras, their applications, and related areas of research.

This volume examines the impact of the 'Monstrous Moonshine' paper on mathematics and theoretical physics.

This work is motivated by and develops connections between several branches of mathematics and physics--the theories of Lie algebras, finite groups and modular functions in mathematics, and string theory in physics. The first part of the book presents a new mathematical theory of vertex operator algebras, the algebraic counterpart of two-dimensional holomorphic conformal quantum field theory. The remaining part constructs the Monster finite simple group as the automorphism group of a very special vertex operator algebra, called the "moonshine module" because of its relevance to "monstrous moonshine."