Moonshine Master Toys with String Theory

From their paper:

""" According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a flame or light that is lambent is playing “lightly upon or gliding over a surface without burning it, like a ‘tongue of fire’; shining with a soft clear light and without fierce heat.” And since the light of umbral moonshine is apparently of this nature, we call the six values in Λ = {2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 13} lambent, and we refer to the index ℓ ∈ Λ as the lambency of the connections relating the umbral group G(ℓ) to the umbral forms Z(ℓ) and H(ℓ)g . """

That is some very fine literary influences indeed.

The title makes me think it's talking about Richard Borcherds, who solved the moonshine conjecture (and got the Fields Medal for that), and is now interested in TQFT (topological quantum field theory).

However it's about Iris Cheng. I'm not saying she's not good or anything like that, but how can the author call someone "moonshine master" while what happened is "She happened to have read a book about the “monstrous moonshine,”"?

I took John Duncan's course on intro abstract algebra when I was a sophomore at CWRU. I had signed up to take his class on modular forms the next semester but he had been hired away before I had the chance to take it. A big shame as he was one of the best professors I've had (nearly the entire course grade was based on homework- exactly as it should be IMO).