A new mathematical celebrity: E8

Towards the end of last month, the popular media across the world covered a story about pure mathematics research. While this is not unheard of, it was rather surprising - though not in a bad way! The story in question was about a calculation carried out by a group of mathematicians, investigating the structure of an object called "E₈". (Actually, many different objects can be reasonably labelled E₈ but the one they were interested in is the split real form of the Lie group. Don't worry if you don't know what that is! The links below will help explain.)

For those interested in knowing more, I suggest starting with the original information put out by the group or the BBC's report of it. These also include some "pretty pictures" (they're mathematical, so they do mean something, rather than simply being decorative!) There's a more in-depth discussion in comments posted by John Baez and others on the n-Category Cafe blog. This is aimed at the semi-knowledgeable and could be considered a warm-up for the full technical details.

This story highlights several features of modern pure mathematical research:

• even the explicit calculations often take substantial computing power;
• the calculations provide glimpses of more general theory (they're not the end of the story, just the beginning);
• it's hard to convey in layperson's language what's actually being done (if you're not a mathematician, please don't take it personally when we say it's hard to explain!);
• sometimes you get very pretty pictures: it's all about symmetry! And finally
  
• representation theory is cool*
  

(* OK, I'm biased. But really, it is!)