According to a proof effort led by Daniel Gorenstein that spanned more than ten thousand pages, this is the largest finite simple group. For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this enormous group affectionately called the “friendly giant.” John Conway coined the term “moonshine” to describe this group’s connection to modular functions.
ANSWER: Monster group [or Fischer–Griess Monster; accept monstrous moonshine]
[10m] This family of five sporadic groups makes up the first generation of the “happy family” inside the Monster. These permutation groups are named for the French mathematician who introduced the first of them, M-sub-12.
ANSWER: Mathieu groups [prompt on sharply multiply transitive groups]
[10h] The Mathieu groups can be constructed from these combinatorial block designs, which are collections of k-element subsets of the first n positive integers, with the property that every t-element set is contained in exactly one such subset. The Fano plane is one of these objects defined by the tuple (2, 3, 7).
ANSWER: Steiner systems [accept Steiner triple systems; prompt on partial answer]
<SH/JC, Other Science (Math)>