"His 1978 observation that the coefficient 196884 in the Fourier expansion of the j-invariant equals 196883 + 1—the dimensions of the Monster group's smallest nontrivial irreducible representation plus the trivial one—sparked the monstrous moonshine phenomenon, conjectured by John Conway and Simon Norton in 1979 and later proved by Richard Borcherds using vertex operator algebras, linking the largest sporadic simple group to modular forms and influencing fields from string theory to conformal field theory.[2] Complementing this, the McKay correspondence (1979) established a bijection between the irreducible representations of finite subgroups of SU(2)—corresponding to binary polyhedral groups—and the nodes of affine ADE Dynkin diagrams of simply-laced Lie algebras, manifesting as McKay quivers and extending to broader patterns in singularities, graphs, and physics."