Times have sure changed; with Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorm in newspapers for over a year, then "A Beautiful Mind" from Hollywood; it's almost not surprising that the solution of a difficult math problem is mentioned at CNN.com.
The Exceptional Lie Group E8 computation just got done (some info at http://www.aimath.org/E8/computerdetails.html about the details of the computation itself). Reference to the system SAGE is a bit ambiguous; it's the name of a symbolic mathematics package and apparently also a 16-node system at the same University of Washington. Natually I was curious about the computer, but ironically, it seems that while they can handle a matrix with half a million rows and colums each (and each entry is a polynomial of degree up to 22, with 7 digit coeficients), their departmental web server can't handle the load of all of CNN's readership browsing at once :-) The group E8 itself, together with some explanation of the recent news, is in wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_%28mathematics%29 Dr Brown might explain better than I could how sometimes the best way to understand a thing is to break it down into simple groups of symmetries. Apparently, one of the funky things about E8 is that the "easiest way to understand it" is itself. Peter
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