Existence and Uniqueness
The Monster was predicted by Bernd Fischer (unpublished) and Robert Griess (1976) in about 1973 as a simple group containing a double cover of Fischer's baby monster group as a centralizer of an involution. Within a few months the order of M was found by Griess using the Thompson order formula, and Fischer, Conway, Norton and Thompson discovered other groups as subquotients, including many of the known sporadic groups, and two new ones: the Thompson group and the Harada-Norton group. Griess (1982) constructed M as the automorphism group of the Griess algebra, a 196884-dimensional commutative nonassociative algebra. John Conway (1985) and Jacques Tits (1984, 1985) subsequently simplified this construction.
Griess's construction showed that the Monster existed. Thompson (1979) showed that its uniqueness (as a simple group satisfying certain conditions coming from the classification of finite simple groups) would follow from the existence of a 196883-dimensional faithful representation. A proof of the existence of such a representation was announced by Norton (1985), though he has never published the details. Griess, Meierfrankenfeld & Segev (1989) gave the first complete published proof of the uniqueness of the monster (more precisely, they showed that a group with the same centralizers of involutions as the monster is isomorphic to the monster).
Read more about this topic: Monster Group
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