The Mount Everest of math mandalas
Having packed in the study of mathematics as absolutely soon as possible midway through high school, I take great pleasure in (a) reading about somebody else having to solve an egregious bugger of a math problem, and (b) being told that the solution looks like this.
As widely reported last month, a squad of 18 integer boffins at the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, California, finally, at long last, someone order a round of beers, concluded four years of work figuring out the “Lie group E8″, a riddle posed 120 years ago by one of their own, the Norwegian Sophus Lie, the bastard.
Newsmen forced to come up with an angle on the story that Joe Average and his wife Amoeba could understand between mouthfuls of cereal talked the researchers into quantifying the scale of the problem like this: If you trained every monkey on the planet to write out the calculations, eventually, assuming they got it right, they’d cover the entire island of Manhattan with the paperwork.
A little less inanely, as explained at the institute’s website, the answer is a matrix with 453,060 rows and columns and 205,263,363,600 “polynomial entries”. If each entry was written in a one-inch square of paper, the patched-together calculation would measure more than seven miles on each side. There’s about 60 times as much data in the answer as there is in the map of the human genome. If you packed it tightly into your iPod, it would keep playing for 45 days in MP3 format. See the rest.
