It is indeed a pleasure to be at this World Food Prize celebration here in Des Moines to participate in honoring this year’s co-laureates, Dr. Monty Jones and Prof. Yuan Longping, two giants in rice research. How appropriate it is that we honor them this year—2004, the International Year of Rice. In Africa and Asia, respectively, they have both made remarkable contributions toward the eradicati...

For a knot K in S, let T(K) be the characteristic toric sub-orbifold of the orbifold (S, K) as defined by Bonahon-Siebenmann. If K has unknotting number one, we show that an unknotting arc for K can always be found which is disjoint from T(K), unless either K is an EM-knot (of Eudave-Muñoz) or (S,K) contains an EM-tangle after cutting along T(K). As a consequence, we describe exactly which larg...

Invent. Math. 109, 405-444 (1992). Richard E. Borcherds, Department of pure mathematics and mathematical statistics, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1SB, England. We prove Conway and Norton’s moonshine conjectures for the infinite dimensional representation of the monster simple group constructed by Frenkel, Lepowsky and Meurman. To do this we use the no-ghost theorem from string theory to construc...