Scottish solids

John McKay

pointed me to a few interesting links on 'Platonic' solids and monstrous

moonshine. If you thought that the ancient Greek discovered the five

Platonic solids, think again! They may have been the first to give a

correct proof of the classification but the regular solids were already

known in 2000BC as some

neolithic stone artifacts discovered in Scotland show. These

Scottish solids can be visited at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. McKay

also points to the paper Polyhedra in physics,

chemistry and geometry by Michael Atiyah and Paul Sutcliffe. He also

found my posts on a talk I gave on monstrous moonshine for 2nd year students earlier this year and

mentionted a few errors and updates. As these posts are on my old weblog

I'll repost and update them here soon. For now you can already hear and

see a talk given by John McKay himself 196884=1+196883, a monstrous tale at the Fields Institute.

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