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A Math Couple Solves a Major Group Theory Problem—After 20 Years of Work
Britta Späth has dedicated her career to proving a single, central conjecture. She’s finally succeeded, alongside her partner, Marc Cabanes.
The Concordia University mathematician is perhaps most famous for his “monstrous moonshine” conjecture, which was proved in 1992 and established a deep connection between the so-called monster group and a special function from number theory. The very year that the classification was officially completed, Isaacs, Navarro, and Gunter Malle figured out the right way to reframe the McKay conjecture so that they only had to focus on a narrow set of groups. Mathematicians can now confidently study important properties of groups by looking at their Sylow normalizers alone—a much easier approach to making sense of these abstract entities, and one that might have practical applications.
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