E8 Structure Solved

(Image by jared)

There was an announcement yesterday that a collaboration of mathematicians from the United States and Europe have mapped the structure of E8, which is a 248-dimensional Lie group. It’s actually even more rich than that, but I think the concept of a Lie group is intense enough for one post. What interests me most about this particular problem is that there was some SERIOUS computer horsepower that went into the solution. As the Yahoo! news story indicates, “While the human genome, which contains all the genetic information of a cell, is less than a gigabyte in size, the result of the E8 calculation, which contains all the information about E8, is 60 gigabytes in size.” Yikes. Amongst other practical applications this result will provide some good information for physicists who study string theory. The reason for this is that structure of E8 is both symmetrical and extremely complex. Please check out the American Institute of Mathematics page on the E8 project here for more information. There’s a lot of great information on their site. So what does the structure of E8 look like? Here’s the picture: