E8
March 19th, 2007 by WaltThe Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations, a project to compute all unitary representations of real semisimple Lie groups, has successfully computed the Kazhdan-Lustig-Vogan polynomials of the split real form of the exceptional Lie group E8, a calculation. This result is so exciting that the American Institute of Mathematics
put out a press release comparing it to the Human Genome Project.
I can’t even imagine what an announcement like this looks like from the outside. I don’t know the significance of the result myself, though the classification of all unitary representations of Lie groups is obviously an important one. For a more detailed descriptions, see this post at the n-Category Cafe, and the ensuing discussion.
March 27th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
[...] This article at the website for the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations provides more details for last week’s highly touted announcement of the computation of the Kahzdan-Lusztig-Vogan polynomials for E8. It sounds like they were as surprised as anyone that the announcement made such a big media splash. [...]