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

[LordSchnitzel]

I've found that the mathematics pages on Wikipedia really are attempting to explain to the layman. Granted - to understand the issue you may have to spider around to various other articles - like the (very good) main pages on Groups and Topology. For comparison look at the equivalent pages on mathworld.wolfram.org where the material is presented with far less explanation. Wikipedia here is probably a non-mathematicians best shot at getting the point of the issue.

Re:mandatory Wikipedia link

[asninn]

To paraphrase what my history teacher used to say, Wikipedia articles like this (in fact, any article in any encyclopedia!) should be as simple as possible, but at the same time as complex as necessary. In other words, simplifying the presentation of a concept or an object is good, but it shouldn't reach a point where the actual nature of the concept or object in question is warped.

That being said, there's always the option of having both a "thorough" and a "simple" version of an article, too; see e.g. [[M-theory]] and [[M-theory simplified]]. There's no reason why in addition to [[Lie group]], there shouldn't also be a [[Lie groups simplified]] or [[Lie groups for dummies]] or so. :)

Summary by a mathematician

[Ambitwistor]

Category theorist John Baez has a summary [utexas.edu] of this work from a mathematician's perspective. Unfortunately, you need at least an undergraduate math degree to make full sense of it, but it gives more flavor of what's really going on than a news story, and he at least defines mathematically what E8 and KLV polynomials are.

He begins by noting, "You may hear some hype about this soon, because it's a really big calculation, and the American Institute of Mathematics has coaxed a lot of science reporters to write about it -- in part by comparing it to the human genome project. Computing the Kazhdan-Lusztig-Vogan polynomials for E 8 is certainly nowhere nearly as important as the human genome project, nor as hard! But the final result involves more data, in a sense."