Description
The theory of Kac-Moody groups originates in the abstract construction, by generators and relations, of a family of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras over the complex numbers, made independently by Viktor Kac and Robert Moody in 1968. Somewhat unexpectedly, profound connections between those mathematical objects and gravity theories were revealed in the past two decades by the work of Thibault Damour, Marc Henneaux, Hermann Nicolai and others. The goal of this introductory talk is to highlight the mathematical challenges that emerge from those surprising connections.
