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Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:318:...the monster (Alan Sinder)

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This is a Quicksilver page about monsters

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The late author Gerald Kersh wrote of sentient automatia, as has Tim Powers — When the 26 year old Daniel thinks of Leibniz as Monstro it almost conjures up the Disney Whale from Pinnochio. Here be monsters is a mindset an older and wiser Daniel wants eliminated from maps... PinocchiomonstroMW.jpg
Monstro the Whale © Disney - Fair Use
See this movie with the kids ASAP!

Authored entries

Monsters

It is likely Leibniz is a monster — to many — in the sense of being beyond, or exceeding, the power or laws of nature; miraculous. Which means Daniel also views Isaac Newton in the same light. Robert Anton Wilson had Sigismundo Celine AKA Adam Weishaupt refer to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a monster. He should not be viewed as the hideous confrontational antagonist of fiction. Daniel knows real human monsters such as Upnor and Jeffreys, he just has turned a blind eye to them for the moment.

The Dream Dictionary: Monster

Dreaming that you are followed by a monster means that grief and misfortune are in your immediate future. Monsters represent parts of yourself that you find brutish and ugly. You may possess some fears or some repressed emotions. Dreaming that you kill a monster means that you will successfully deal with your rivals and advance to a higher and better position.

Wikipedia: Monster

Monster (lat. monstrum) is a term for any number of legendary creatures that frequently appear in mythology, legend, and horror fiction. They are also a mainstay of role-playing and video games. "Monster" usually, but not always, implies that these creatures are larger than human size. It almost always implies that the creatures are powerful and hostile to the hero, and must be overcome to succeed in the quest.Stgeorge-dragon.jpg
Saint George versus the Dragon
*by Gustave Moreau, (1880)*

Occasionally, there are monsters who act out of legitimate motives and their monsterous appearance leads to serious misunderstandings. One well known example is the Horta in the Star Trek episode, "The Devil in The Dark". It is an ugly looking, but fully sentient rock like monster that could spray a powerful acid and was killing miners in the mines of a planet. However, when Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock investigated the situation, they discovered that the creature was really desperately attempting to defend her young which were being inadvertantly killed by the miners. They inform the miners and a mutually beneficial agreement with the creature was reached to peacefully resolve the situation.

Some well known monsters are: * Bigfoot * Bogeyman * Cthulhu * Frankenstein's monster - Jess Nevin's theories seem sound that the monster is a precursor to the Yellow Peril fear * Godzilla (see Toho Studios; kaiju ) AKA Gojira + Gamera + Mothra + Rodan * Gorgon + Medusa * Grendel * Hydra * Jabberwocky * King Kong * Loch Ness monster * Roc * Scylla & Charybdis * Sphinx * Tarasque

Famous stories involving monsters:

  • The myth of Bellerophon
  • Beowulf
  • The Call of Cthulhu
  • Dracula
  • Frankenstein
  • Saint George
  • The labors of Heracles
  • The Hobbit
  • Jabberwocky, in Through the Looking Glass
  • Jack and the beanstalk
  • The Lord of the Rings
  • Saint Martha and the Tarasque
  • Nibelungenlied
  • The Odyssey
  • The myth of Perseus
  • Theseus and the minotaur
  • Antagonists of Doctor Who150px-DrWho4.jpg
    Fourth Doctor played
    by Tom Baker

It's not beyond the wit of certain British writers to invoke The Doctor as a precursor to Doctor Who the British science fiction television series, produced by the BBC and concerning the adventures of a mysterious time-travelling adventurer known only as 'The Doctor'. It is also the title of a 1996 television movie featuring the same character. The program was and remains a significant part of British popular culture, widely recognised for its creative storytelling, use of innovative music which was produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and low-budget special effects. The show has become a cult television favourite on par with Star Trek, and has influenced generations of British genre television writers, many of whom grew up watching the series. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, Doctor Who was placed third. A new series of Doctor Who television episodes is being produced by the BBC. It is scheduled to broadcast on BBC One in Spring 2005.

Wikipedia: Monster group

In mathematics, the Monster group M is a group of order    246 · 320 · 59 · 76 · 112 · 133 · 17 · 19 · 23 · 29 · 31 · 41 · 47 · 59 · 71 = 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000 ≈ 8 · 1053.

It is a simple group, meaning it does not have any normal subgroups except for the subgroup consisting only of the identity element, and M itself. Despite the name, simple groups are far from "simple". The finite simple groups are important because in a certain sense they are the "basic building blocks" of all finite groups, somewhat similar to the way prime numbers are the basic building blocks of the integers. This is expressed by the Jordan-Hölder theorem.

The only simple groups which are abelian are the cyclic groups whose order is a prime number. In a huge collaborative effort, the classification of finite simple groups was accomplished in 1982.

The Monster was found by B. Fischer and R. Griess in 1973. It can be constructed as a group of rotations in a space of dimension 196,883 over the rational numbers.

The Monster group prominently features in the [http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/98legacy/08-19-1998a.html Monstrous Moonshine conjecture which relates discrete and non-discrete mathematics and was proven by Richard Borcherds in 1989.

Richard Borcherds

Richard Ewen Borcherds (born November 29, 1959) is a mathematician specializing in group theory and Lie algebras. He was born in Cape Town and educated at Cambridge University, where he studied under John Horton Conway. After receiving his doctorate he has held various positions at Cambridge and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently a professor of mathematics.

Borcherds is best known for his work connecting the theory of finite groups with other areas in mathematics. In particular he invented the notion of vertex algebras, which he used to prove the Conway-Norton conjecture. This is related to representation theory of the monster group, a very large finite simple group whose structure was previously not well-understood.

He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994, and also received the John Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society and the Prize of the Society of Paris in 1992. Borcherds was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.

“…The Monstrous Moonshine conjecture provides an interrelationship between the Monster Group and modular functions. Modular functions are used in modeling structures in two dimensions, and can be helpful, for example, in the description of molecular structures. The Monster Group, in contrast, seemed to be of importance only to pure mathematicians. … In his proof, Borcherds uses many ideas of string theory - a surprisingly fruitful way of making theoretical physics useful for mathematical theory. Although still the subject of dispute among physicists, strings offer a way of explaining many of the puzzles surrounding the origins of the universe. They were proposed in the search for a single consistent theory which brings together various partial theories of cosmology. Strings have a length but no other dimension and may be open strings or closed loops. …”[1]

  1. UC Berkeley professor wins highest honor in mathematics, the prestigious Fields Medal
  2. "Borcherds, Gowers, Kontsevich, and McMullen Receive Fields Medals", Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 45, Number 10 (November 1998), electronic copy at [2]
  3. James Lepowsky, "The Work of Richard Borcherds", Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 46, Number 1 (January 1999), electronic copy at [3]
  4. Richard Borcherds, "What is The Monster?", Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 49, Number 9 (October 2002), electronic copy at [4]
  5. Richard Borcherds' web site [5]. (has links to some relatively informal lecture notes describing his work)
  6. cryptozoology
  7. legendary creature
  8. sea monster
  9. lake monster
  10. Frankenstein
  11. Doctor Who
  12. Doctor Who Image:(Fair use. BBC Doctor Who website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/doctorwho/)
  13. Walt Disney's Monstro should be fair use as well.

This article is about monsters as a kind of hostile legendary creature. For other uses, see Monster (disambiguation).