For math geeks

[Amelia]

Ananova:

Solved after 120 years!

A team of maths experts has cracked a 120-year puzzle - even though many boffins do not even understand what it's all about.

The solution is so complex that the handwritten solution would cover Manhattan island in New York, reports Sky News.

And when stored in highly compressed form on a computer hard drive, it takes up as much space as 45 days of continuous music in MP3 format.

An international team of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists was assembled to map a theoretical object known as the "Lie group E8".

Lie groups were invented by 19th-Century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie in his study of symmetrical objects, especially spheres, and differential calculus.

The E8 group, which dates to 1887, is the most complicated Lie group, with 248 dimensions, and was long considered impossible to solve.

"To say what precisely it is is something even many mathematicians can't understand," said Jeffrey Adams, the project's leader and a math professor at the University of Maryland.

The team - assembled by the American Institute of Mathematics - revealed their findings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Their work took four years research and involves about 60 times as much data as the Human Genome Project.

[D. Allan]

impressive!

[Bravus]

One of the cool things about this is that some guy in the century before last was able to conceptualise it, and we just now have the technology to compute it. The mind is still over a century ahead of the computer!

[Gail]

[Ellen]

I saw a documentary on this man, he couldn't concentrate on other things because the solving of this math problem was his whole life. He barely stopped to eat etc. to go back to his calculating. The story really stuck with me, how dedicated and driven he was. Even though I couldn't understand what it was that he solved.

There are many intelligent minds laboring wth things privately that one day come out in major finds/conclusions.

What problem can I work on?