John Conway (26 December 1937-11 April 2020)

I was in a conference in Canada and was supposed to give a talk on my work on modular forms for triangle groups jointly written with Ch. Doran, Terry Gannon and Khosro Shokri. At some point I started to chat with two men one of them I knew: John McKay. The other was on wheelchair and was talking passionately about mathematics. At some point I started to talk about monstrous moonshine conjecture, as still I was hopeful to find similar conjectures for my modular forms for triangle groups and CY modular forms. The man in the wheelchair started to talk about Borcherds' proof, saying that checking just few coefficients of an equality was not enough to earn him Fields Medal. In the middle of his conversation I realized that he was the advisor of Borcherds and then of course: He was John Conway. As one of the founders of this amazing conjecture, he said that we do not know yet why the j-function of elliptic curves has to do with the Monster group. And this is actually true. Borcherds' proof of the conjecture does not shed some light on this. But, still in my mind it was a contradictory feeling why he was not so happy that his own student got Fields medal.



Hossein Movasati
April 13, 2020.