First meet with the Monster

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-Albert Einstein

Recently I finished reading Symmetry and the Monster by Mark Ronan. It was a chance find on my last Landmark trip, I happened to have read something about it on the net and picked it up. It is a history of Group theory, right from the time when E. Galois pioneered it in demonstrating the unsolvability of general quintic in Nineteenth century up to the present day. Galois, despite his genius (or was it because of it?), led a very tragic life and died in a duel at a very young age. The account of this tragic event presented in the book (which differs from Bell's) is very.. let me say senti. Significant theorems were later discovered by Langrange, Cauchy, Burnside and Feit-Thompson, including others.* [Please go and read the footnote in case you missed the last end-of-sentence marker. Thank You]. Simultaneously continued the discovery of all the finite simple groups (the atoms of symmetry), their classification (there are 18 countably infinite families), and discovery of exceptions that won't fit in any family (there are 26 of these). The Monster in the title is the largest of these exceptions, and exists in 196,884 dimensions. [Someone proposed the name 'Friendly Giant' for this beast, but it never caught on. Does it tell us something about human psyche? ;)]. It was a huge undertaking, spanning centuries and contributions came from many directions. The book captures the excitement of this endeavour well. Plus it explains how symmetry groups are related with leading edge physics like String theory (most of that stuff went over my head, but I can't blame it on Mark). There were other things that I did not understand as well, but I guess that can be a virtue for a book. If you think you understood everything too well, you might stop there. This book whets your appetite, and so at least a possibility exists that I'll look up some of these things elsewhere (not necessary that it will be realized though, at least going by my track record :). But that aside, if you want to meet the Monster, let this be your first step.

Enjoy!!

* I might give the impression that I understand this stuff. I want to assure you that I really don't. This is the first book I read about Group theory and it is a popular science book. But again, the following quote by the great John Von Neumann might be in order. "In mathematics, you don't understand things. You just get used to them."