The monster is an exquisite beauty?

So I recent bought this nicely written book: Symmetry and the Monster: one of the greatst quests of mathematics, by Mark Ronan. It is written in a short novel form, not as hardcore text full of immensely difficult looking equations. This book is a great introduction to modern mathematics.

Flipping through the pages, I saw some fascinating discussion of the lives of some famous mathematicians, and some modern history. One of them is the most interesting mathematician ever lived: Galois, who died at just age 20 at a duel, leaving the world with Galois theory which mathematicians find "exquisite beauty". It (supposedly) answer this question with immense elegance: why is there no formula for the roots of a 5th order polynomial and beyond?

Sorry, this graduate level pure math stuff is beyond my comprehension. Galois was just 20 year old! He has already reached the genius level. As the author puts it, Galois Theory is "common mathematics currency today". One can only guess what sort of contributions he can make if he lived longer. This book also talks about the lives of Lie (pronounced lee) and many other modern mathematicians and their discoveries. It also talks about the impacts of the 2 world wars on modern mathematics. Prominent math students were put on the front lines and died. How horrible.

Besides mathematicians, of course this book talks about mathematics. Unfortunately after a few chapters it becomes way over my understanding. 196883 dimensions? oh my. No wonder it is called a "monster". Yet the author is trying hard to share this "exquisite beauty". Lie and his algebra... I remember seeing the name of this person on the graduate school bulletin... Leech Lattice... I remember watching an interview on TV about a divorced mathematican who studied this 24 dimension thing, something about stacking tennis balls...

I start to get lost at all the discussion of "groups". In fact, I don't even fully understand the "symmetry" involved. The author didn't start by defining a group: sets and operations and identity/inverse elements. I understood this much from an attempt to take abstract algebra in college, which I later dropped.

The problem of reading a book is that I cannot raise my hand and say "professor, can you explain it again"? I will probably never be in an elite group who understand all this stuff. This stuff may link to better understanding in number theory or quantum physics.

I wish I can understand all these, and explain everything to the layman in even more straightforward way. Your heavy accent math professors at your school cannot do it. The author has done a great job, it is just me not understand it, that's all.

Last note: the About the Author page says besides math, he loves music and even danced for the Nutcracker. Amazing. Mathematicians sometimes should stay away the abstractions for some other fun activities.