Recently, I was watching an [interview][1] that John Conway did with [Numberphile][2]. By the end of the video, Brady Haran asked John: > If you were to come back a hundred years after your death, what problem would you like to know about ? John replied: > I would really like to know why the Monster Group exists. From what I have read, it seems like research has moved on toward exploring the connections between the monster moonshine conjectures and other fields such as conformal field theory. I do know that Conway didn't particularly like the idea of the existence having to do with CFT, e.g., - Siobhan Roberts, [Curiosities: pursuing the Monster. What lies beneath a structure with an unimaginable 196,883 dimensions?][3], IAS, 2013 Therefore, I am trying to understand what he means by "why". I couldn't really find any papers where he further went into the question, why can't the existence of the group be a coincidence? Have there been any further developments in relation to this question? Update: So I found another interview, in which John explains a bit further: ["I think there is something so fundamental about this object that there should be a simpler definition or a simpler construction"][4] [1]: https://youtu.be/xOCe5HUObD4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/@numberphile [3]: https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2013/roberts-monster [4]: https://youtu.be/lbN8EMcOH5o?si=C80LxUyprTHeGTVZ