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this is just an excerpt from that page linked above:
Perhaps the most fascinating and mysterious sporadic group of symmetries was discovered by Robert Griess at Princeton. He ''constructed'' a sort of snowflake like figure in 196883 dimensional space which had over 1053 symmetries (that's one with 53 zeroes - more than there are atoms in the sun). But this group of symmetries could not be decomposed into a combination of smaller symmetries.
This object Conway christened the Monster. As people studied the Monster, it became clear that it was more than just a mathematician's curiosity but related to fundamental questions of mathematics and physics. People talked mystically about it being the symmetry group of the universe and it began to take on an almost religious status. Although mathematicians have failed so far to find God in the Monster, they have discovered an intimate relation between the Monster and what physicists call string theory. As those who have read their Hawking will know, physicists hope that string theory will provide a true description of the physical world.
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