Terry Gannon

Biography

Terry Gannon is an assistant professor belongs to the department of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences from the university of Alberta.

Research Interest

I am interested in a fairly wide range of math, especially the interactions of algebra, number theory, and mathematical physics, but most of my work (so far at least) is related somehow to a rich structure discovered in mathematical physics called conformal field theory. A lot of my energy has been directed toward their classification,in particular that of their partition functions, which in the most interesting cases are sesquilinear modular invariant combinations of Kac-Moody characters. This is a long-term project involving Lie theory and number theory [28-26,21-19,17,16,14-11,9-6]. I have also worked on monstrous moonshine, an area of many conjectures and few proofs concerning unexpected relationships between certain finite groups and modular functions [22]. See [29] for a review article on both these topics. Another project of interest to me involves a certain action of the absolute Galois group of the rationals on various quantities associated to e.g. conformal field theories and knots [24,18,10]. Additional projects I am interested in include the general structure of CFT [31], fusion rings [34,25,23], permutations with forbidden subpatterns [30], vertex algebras, string theory [32,5,1], and lattices [4-2]. In short, I enjoy math which spills over boundaries, and I love to learn new stuff.