Mathematicians (finally) completely describe 248-dimensional object

(image courtesy the The New York Times/Peter McMullen)
Mad Professah is excited to report that E8 has been fully described. What the heck am I talking about? Why, all the 248 possible symmetries of a 57-dimensional object, of course! (See visualization above.) Sophus Lie, a 19th century Norwegian mathematican, is the creator of Lie Group Theory, which deals with continuous symmetry.

On Monday March 19th, MIT Mathematics Professor David Vogan gave a talk entitled "The Character Table for E8, or How We Wrote Down a 453,060 x 453,060 Matrix and Found Happiness" (9mb pdf.)

"What's attractive about studying E8 is that it's as complicated as symmetry can get. Mathematics can almost always offer another example that's harder than the one you're looking at now, but for Lie groups E8 is the hardest one," Vogan said.

"E8 was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood," said Jeffrey Adams, project leader and a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. "This groundbreaking achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge, as well as a major advance in the use of large-scale computing to solve complicated mathematical problems."

Fellow gay mathematician J.M. Kreps Professor of Mathematics Robert Bryant of Duke University is quoted in Tuesday's New York Times giving an analogy to describe the significance of the mathematical breakthrough. "Scientists can learn a lot about an animal from its DNA, but to understand it fully 'you have to grow the organism and then study it,' Dr. Bryant said. 'In a certain sense, that is what the E8 team did. They used massive computation to fully develop the group E8 and its representations so that they could list its important features.'"