An international team of mathematicians has detailed a vast complex numerical "structure" which was invented more than a century ago. Mapping the 248-dimensional structure, called E8, took four years of work and produced more data than the Human Genome Project, researchers said. E8 is a "Lie group", a means of describing symmetrical objects. The team said their findings may assist fields of physics which use more than four dimensions, such as string theory. Lie groups were invented by the 19th Century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounced "Lee")...An international team of mathematicians has detailed a vast complex numerical "structure" which was invented more than a century ago. Mapping the 248-dimensional structure, called E8, took four years of work and produced more data than the Human Genome Project, researchers said. "While mathematicians have known for a long time about the beauty and the uniqueness of E8, we physicists have come to appreciate its exceptional role only more recently," commented Hermann Nicolai, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (the Albert Einstein Institute) in Germany. "Yet, in our attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces into a consistent theory of quantum gravity, we now encounter it at almost every corner."
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Mar 20, 2007 1:12am
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