From Ananova

Solved after 120 years!A team of maths experts has cracked a 120-year puzzle - even though many boffins do not even understand what it’s all about.

The solution is so complex that the handwritten solution would cover Manhattan island in New York, reports Sky News.

And when stored in highly compressed form on a computer hard drive, it takes up as much space as 45 days of continuous music in MP3 format.

An international team of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists was assembled to map a theoretical object known as the “Lie group E8″.

Lie groups were invented by 19th-Century Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie in his study of symmetrical objects, especially spheres, and differential calculus.

The E8 group, which dates to 1887, is the most complicated Lie group, with 248 dimensions, and was long considered impossible to solve.

“To say what precisely it is is something even many mathematicians can’t understand,” said Jeffrey Adams, the project’s leader and a math professor at the University of Maryland.

The team - assembled by the American Institute of Mathematics - revealed their findings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Their work took four years research and involves about 60 times as much data as the Human Genome Project.

I fail to see how this benefits anyone other than mathematicians who set out to pad their own egos.  Of course, a great deal of scientific work could be described as such. It follows that a great deal of money gets thrown down the toilet as well.

Can you think of any examples of “vanity science” that fascinate the public but will provide no tangible benefit to our lifestyle? (we still foot the bill though.) I can think of one BIG one but I’ll save it for another post…