E8 Structure Decoded

arobic writes "A group of mathematicians from US and Europe succeeded in mapping the E8 structure, an example of a Lie group. These were developed by the well-known mathematician Sophus Lie (pronounce Lee) in the last century and are used for many applications, mainly in theoretical physics. This is an important breakthrough as it could help physicists working on Grand Unified Theories (aka GUTs)."

Re:mandatory Wikipedia link

[kestasjk]

Should an encyclopedia try to give a layman's definition of something that probably really is beyond the reach of the average person?

Re:iPod

[Dara Hazeghi]

You find it funny. I find it a little sad... It's sad that storage size in "layman's terms" is now related to hours of MP3 playback. A whole generation of people are not going to understand storage outside of the iPod universe.

Re:mandatory Wikipedia link

[Tx]

IMHO, yes. There are few subjects where the layman (that's me) can't at least be given an idea of what the subject is about, if the material is written well. I hold up books such as Hyperspace by Michio Kaku as examples of how to convey complex subject matter to the layman, in a very readable and comprehensible way.

Re:iPod

[SatanicPuppy]

It's not sad. Jesus, they were still measuring things in "War and Peace"'s a few years ago! At least now they're measuring it in an actual digital object, and moreover, it makes sense to a lot of people because a lot of people have gotten to the point where they actually appreciate that those files on their computer have an actual "size" at all!

It seems lame to us...Hell I remember when hard drives measured in tens of megabytes, and space was a real issue, all the time. Geeks deal in so many different types of digital files, so many different formats...Tell a geek its "45 hours of mp3 music" and they'll say, "At what bitrate?"

But for a layman to actually be able to measure space in terms of things that you can't physically touch? That's a pretty big accomplishment.

Re:mandatory Wikipedia link

[superwiz]

Actually, that's not the case. To give an analogy, say you are working on optimization of some process involved in database storage. Could you explain what that means to your mother (assuming your mother does not have a technical background)? You couldn't say anything beyond vagueries like "making faster" or "making more efficient". Well, on that level, Lie groups describe continuous symmetries (like rotations of a sphere). To get to a level even a little bit deeper would take a 1 semester undergraduate course just to learn what is going on. Sometimes specilization creates escoteric fields. That's just how it is. Math is "universal" because all the math that you are used to seeing was developed 200+ years ago, so it is the root of all knowledge that we now call mathematics. So as every laymen who knows some abc's, you want to think that the specilized knowledge in the subject is not outside of your grasp. Well, again, try explaining to your mother the finer points of what you do. And again (again) realize that specilized knowledge in a discipline does not make the knowledge useless -- it markes the discipline as a professional (rather than hobbyist) endeavor.

Re:mandatory Wikipedia link

[eh2o]

Most technical jargon has very precise semantics and can't be transcoded into "laymans' terms" without an absurd explosion of verbosity that ultimately takes more time to wade through than just learning the technical vocabulary in the first place.

However, speaking as an applied mathematician, I look for a list of applications of a concept. Since this is basically informational content it is readily found on Wikipedia or elsewhere and typically vastly easier to understand than the concept itself. Given that information I can determine if its worth the effort to actually learn it. This sort of information can also be found in books like Hyperspace, and IMHO, is also just about the only real information they contain other than some historical details.

Re:mandatory Wikipedia link

[mbrod]

Kaku devoted a whole book to his explanation and the previous poster actually wanted to understand what Kaku was talking about.

If the reader actually wants to know, most people really don't, well I should say they just don't care, then given a moderate sized layman's explanation of it in a paper or book will usually suffice.

You stated:

optimization of some process involved in database storage

Something like this is simple to explain to people unaware of the inner workings of databases. You just explain it referencing something similar like a book with an index at the back. And then how a index in the back organized in way A vs. way B is better or worse. There are always analogies to be found that people understand. Requires a good writer though and certainly not all of us are as good as Kaku.

Sage the "super" computer

[LotsOfPhil]

In the end the calculation took about 77 hours on the supercomputer Sage. [washington.edu]

Supercomputer my foot!

The connection has timed out
The server at sage.math.washington.edu is taking too long to respond.

Re:mandatory Wikipedia link

[jd]

Well, yes. There are usually analogies to any computational process that mere terrans (as opposed to us elves from the planet Tharkquark) can understand.

Let's take the database optimization. Databases are merely methods of storing and organizing data. Let's say that you are denormalizing a relational database, splitting it into locally-connected "islands" and running each island on its own load-balancing system. This is no trivial setup - you have changed the structure of the data and are running it on a cluster where each "node" on that cluster is itself a cluster. This is no trivial thing that - computationally - is outside the realms of more than a few database engineers. How many companies do you know that run database hypercubes as a matter of course?

Can this be explained to the layperson? Sure. Denormalizing is duplicating information. If your mother didn't build a deck of cards holding favorite recipes from a bunch of recipe books, she's probably the only one who didn't. Duplicating data to make it easy and quick to look up is something almost everyone does at some time or other. If you're having trouble explaining this, point to the examples around you.

Load-balancing? Virtually everyone is familiar with sharing the workload.

Dividing up into self-contained sets of records and clustering them? That doesn't sound very real-worldish. Well, yes it is. Departments, compartments, apartments - all different ways to describe isolated groups of self-relating entities that nonetheless can interact in defined ways.

There is absolutely no problem in computing that you can describe that does not have a real-world counterpart. This is a direct consequence of Turing's definition of Computable. If the layman doesn't understand, it is not because they can't, it's because nobody took the time.