Kostant on E8 (original) (raw)
Bertram Kostant
February 12, 2008
On Some Mathematics in Garrett Lisi's "E8 Theory of Everything"
Abstract: A physicist, Garrett Lisi, has published a highly controversial, but fascinating, paper purporting to go beyond the Standard Model in that it unifies all 4 forces of nature by using as gauge group the exceptional Lie group E8. My talk, strictly mathematical, will be about an elaboration of the mathematics of E8 which Lisi relies on to construct his theory.
- streaming or downloadable video.
- lecture notes, also available in PDF and LaTeXthanks to Adler Santos
This talk was given as a colloquium at U.C. Riverside. Earlier on the same day John Baez gave an elementary introduction to E8. You can also can see this talk as streaming video or downloadable video.
Here is Lisi's paper:
- Garrett Lisi, An exceptionally simple theory of everything and here is some criticism of it:
- Jacques Distler, A little group theory andA little more group theory. Some other relevant papers include:
- Robert L. Griess, Jr. and A. J. E. Ryba, Embeddings of PGL(2,31) and SL(2,32) in E8(C), with appendices by Michael Larsen and Jean Pierre Serre, Duke Math. J. 94 (1998), 181-211.
- Jean-Pierre Serre, Sous-groupes finis des groupes de Lie, Séminaire Bourbaki vol. 1998/99, Astérisque 266 (2000), 415-230.
Videos © 2008 Bertram Kostant and John Baez
Image © John Stembridge
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu