Daily Archives: March 19, 2007

No, not another flower from my garden. This is a two dimensional projection (originally hand drawn in the 1960s by Peter McMullen, of a polytope that lives in eight dimensions, known as the Gossett polytope 4₂₁. Click here to be taken over to the American Institute for Mathematics (AIM) site for more information about it. (This image was computer generated by John Stembridge, and you can get higher resolution there for use on your T-shirts and so forth.)

What does this all pertain to? A new result from a team of mathematicians. They’ve done what some are calling the mathematician’s equivalent of mapping the genome of a Lie group, the one called E₈. Groups pertain to symmetries. Symmetries are […] Click to continue reading this post →