On 3/19/07, Simon Plouffe <simon.plouffe@gmail.com> wrote:
this just came out, http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=e8&btnG=Google+Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&... it appears in a number of sites already. What is it that we could not do up to now in fact?
The NSF press release at this site is reasonably informative. I hope it's in order to quote the following paragraph therefrom: "The Atlas of Lie Groups Project The E8 calcuation is part of an ambitious project sponsored by AIM and the National Science Foundation (NSF), known as the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations. The goal of the Atlas project is to determine the unitary representations of all the Lie groups (E8 is the largest of the exceptional Lie groups). This is one of the most important unsolved problems of mathematics. The E8 calculation is a major step, and suggests that the Atlas team is well on the way to solving this problem. The Atlas project is funded by the NSF through the American Institute of Mathematics." There is more technical detail at http://www.liegroups.org/ . WFL