Proceedings on Moonshine and Related Topics (Crm Proceedings & Lecture Notes, V. 30)

This volume contains the proceedings of the Moonshine workshop held at the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques (CRM) in Montreal. A glance at the contents will reveal that the connection of some papers to Moonshine is not immediate; however, Moonshine has proved to be a very fertile area, and it does not stretch the imagination to believe that many more threads will be drawn together before we understand what is really going on. In this volume, all the classical Moonshine themes are presented, namely the Monster simple group and other finite groups, automorphic functions and forms and related congruence groups, and vertex algebras and their representations. These topics appear in either a pure form or in a blend of algebraic geometry dealing with algebraic surfaces, Picard-Fuchs equations, and hypergeometric functions.