Dr. John McKay

John McKay pioneered the field of computational group theory, especially the construction of characters and new simple groups. He discovered deep connections between group structures that have driven fundamental developments in finite groups over the past three decades, such as the "Alperin-McKay conjecture", relating irreducible characters of groups and their local subgroups. His discovery of the "McKay-Thompson series", relating expansions of modular functions to the characters of the "Monster" sporadic group, led to the "Moonshine" conjectures, proved recently by Borcherds. He also discovered a deep relationship between certain finite groups and associated Lie algebras, known as the "McKay correspondence", which has had many recent applications in mathematics and physics.