WASHINGTON: A transatlantic team of number-crunchers announced they had built a theoretical structure in 248 dimensions, resolving a 120-year puzzle that could used to test theories about the structure of the cosmos.

Top computer scientists and mathematicians from the United States and Europe said they had mapped “E8”, a problem that was discovered in 1887 but has had to wait until the era of supercomputers and Internet-linked minds to resolve.

E8 is the mother of all so-called Lie groups — a category of problems invented by a 19th-century Norwegian mathematician, Sophus Lie (pronounced “Lee”), to explore symmetry.

Spheres, cylinders or cones are familiar examples of simple, symmetrical objects in three dimensions. But E8 is a piece of geometric origami that comes in 248 dimensions.—AFP