E8

AFTER four years of intensive collaboration, 18 top mathematicians and computer scientists from the US and Europe have mapped E8, one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics.Project leader Jeffrey Adams said that E8 was discovered in 1887, and until now no one thought the structure could ever be understood.E8 belongs to so-called Lie groups that were invented by a 19th century Norwegian mathematician, Sophus Lie, to study symmetry. The theory holds that underlying any symmetrical object is a Lie group. Balls or cones are examples of symmetric three-dimensional objects. But mathematicians also study symmetries in higher dimensions. In fact, E8 itself is 248-dimensional.