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)."

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Summary by a mathematician

[Ambitwistor]

Category theorist John Baez has a summary 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."