Ever since 1887, when Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie discovered the mathematical group called E8, researchers have been trying to understand the extraordinarily complex object described by a numerical matrix of more than 400,000 rows and columns.


Now, an international team of experts using powerful computers and programming techniques has mapped E8–a feat numerically akin to the mapping of the human genome–allowing for breakthroughs in a wide range of problems in geometry, numbe More …