
GET ALL THE DIRT ON IT HERE: LINKY!
You'd think the horns of the Valar had been sounded and the island of Numenor had risen from the Western Sea.
If that sentence means anything to you at all, you may already know that on April 17 the first book in 30 years to be published under the name JRR Tolkien is released worldwide. The Children of Hurin, started in 1918 but abandoned, has been 'reconstructed' by the writer's son Christopher.
The story promises to be darker than anything seen in Tolkien's other books, including scenes of incest and suicide. While his other work was influenced by English medieval literature, Hurin is more indebted to the Finnish national epic Kalevala
After four years of intensive collaboration, 18 top mathematicians and computer scientists from the United States and Europe have successfully mapped E8, one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics, scientists said late Sunday.
Jeffrey Adams, project leader and mathematics professor at the University of Maryland said E8 was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood.
"This groundbreaking achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge, as well as a major advance in the use of large scale computing to solve complicated mathematical problems," Adams said.
He added that the mapping of E8 may well have unforeseen implications in mathematics and physics which won't be evident for years to come.
E8 belongs to so-called Lie groups that were invented by a 19th century Norwegian mathematician, Sophus Lie, to study symmetry.
The theory holds that underlying any symmetrical object, such as a sphere, is a Lie group.
Balls, cylinders or cones are familiar examples of symmetric three-dimensional objects.
However, mathematicians study symmetries in higher dimensions. In fact, E8 itself is 248-dimensional.