One of the most complex objects mathematics finally described

Not structures of mathematics the more complex will have waited one hundred and twenty years to be described in detail. E8, belonging to "groups of binding", discovered in the 1880S by the mathematician Norwegian Sophus binding, has just been "mapped" at the instigation of the American Institute of mathematics of Palo Alto (USA), by a team of 18 international researchers, after four years of joint efforts.

E8 belongs to a class mathematical used to the origin to describe objects symmetric - sphere, cone, cylinder -- its feature being to apply to "forms" having not 3, but-- 57 Dimensions.

To give an idea of the exploit that represents the description of e8, the researchers are expressed in gigabytes (GB). The result, which has mobilized a powers for seventy-seven hours, takes on 60 GB - the equivalent of forty-five days of music in MP3 format, or 60 human genomes.

"But in the same way that the human genome does not immediately a miracle drug, our results are of the basic tools that will be used in other areas of research, note Jeffrey Adams, responsible for the project. This research will have many implications for the most, that we do not understand still."

E8 interested and chemists, faced with the geometry of molecules, but also the physicists. Hermann Nicolai, of the Institute Einstein of Potsdam (Germany), view and that this "could help them in their search for a theory unified" .