(Note: this talk will have a great overlap with the April 5, 2004 talk by the same speaker.) The talk will give a fairly basic introduction to the evidence why a special class of Kac-Moody algebras, called very-extended algebras, might play a role in the formulation of supergravity theories. This evidence will contain a natural understanding of the field contents of some (super)gravity theories as well as the known dualities that usually are expected to arrive only after dimensional reduction.

A self-contained introduction to the idea of identifying Kac-Moody type symmetries in all known gravity theories.