This is the first installment of the new reality show: Who Wants to be Noah's Advisor. (Well i suppose it should be, whom does Noah want to be his advisor, but that doesn't quite have the right ring.)

Today's contestant is Prof. Richard Borcherds. He has a British accent. He has a Fields medal. (I know, Dave isn't impressed, as he said: "everyone here has a british accent and a Fields medal.) He studies really cool things, including the modular forms and the Monster group. Here is a lecture on Monsterous Moonshine, which is what he's famous for (it even has audio). There are several other lectures with video on his site, if you want to see what he looks like try this link. What would I study? In short he studies particular objects which have strange properties. If there are infinitely many examples of it then it probably isn't what he's looking at. Here's a rather nifty paper of his with a whole bunch of open problems. His most recent two students have studied even unimodular lattices of dimension 32 and "interesting" hyperbolic reflection groups. He's really quiet though, which I'm not sure is the best personality match, and apparently he's a bit hands off as an advisor; e.g. his first question is "well what do you want to study?" and if you haven't figured that out you go read until you come up with a problem. But even though he's quiet, when he does talk he's funny and understandable and interesting. He has a decent geneology, but nothing to write home about, Conway and Littlewood are cool, but there's no Gauss or Artin or someone like that. Apparently he has a very extensive collection of toys which you can build stuff with, like legos and other such things. He has the being a math professor and wandering the halls looking completely absorbed in thought thing down to an art. Oh, lastly, here is his Ph.D. thesis, recommend you have a look at the last twenty or so pages of tables. I want a thesis which is either 9 pages long or that has 20 pages of tables in it.

Anyway, this is all we talk about here these days, who we want to work with.