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New Scientist
The tale of the octonions begins in the mid-16th century. Until that
time, mathematicians had thought that numbers were God-given, a
done deal. No one could contemplate inventing a new number. But
around 1550 the Italian algebraists Girolamo Cardano and Raphael
Bombelli did just that, by writing down the square root of -1. It took
about 400 years to sort out what the thing meant, but only 300 to
convince mathematicians that it was too useful to be ignored.
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The discovery of the octonions was ever after credited to the wrong
person (they are often known as Cayley numbers, even today), but it
didn't really matter because nobody took any notice of them anyway.
The octonions appeared to be nothing more than Victorian
mathematical whimsy.
Graves was not to be put off though, and spent a long while
convinced that his method of going from 4 to 8 could be repeated,
leading to algebras with dimensions of 16, 32, 64 and so on for any
power of 2. He called his 16-dimensional algebra the sedenions, but
he couldn't find a way to make it - or any of the others - work, and
began to doubt whether it could exist.
His doubt was well-founded. We now know that those four algebras,
of dimensions 1, 2, 4 and 8, are the only ones that behave remotely
like ordinary real numbers. The reason is that, with increasing
numbers of dimensions, these systems obey fewer and fewer
algebraic laws - the amount of algebraic structure keeps decreasing.
Put rather too simply, by the time we reach Graves's sedenions,
there's pretty much no algebraic structure left.
And that's not the only mathematical operation that sets them apart.
Numbers in these systems are the only ones to have a "norm",
effectively the number's distance from the origin (see Graphic). With
the complex numbers, the norm of x + iy is x 2 + y2. Because of the
existence of a norm, and their divisibility, these number systems are
known as "normed division algebras".
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But it's certainly true that the octonions remained in the shadows
for a long time. In 1925 Wigner, working with the mathematician
John von Neumann, tried to make the octonions the basis of
quantum mechanics. But he failed, and the octonions slipped back
into obscurity. Until now, that is.
But all this only works if the loop is a many-dimensional surface that
protrudes beyond the familiar four-dimensional space-time, and one
of the burning questions is just how many dimensions there are. At
the moment, finding the answer seems to depend on finding the
number of dimensions where the theories work most elegantly. And
though physicists have not pinned it down precisely, they have
noticed that something rather pleasing occurs when they work with
3, 4, 6 and 10 dimensions. Interestingly, each of these numbers is 2
greater than that of a normed division algebra: subtract 2 from 3, 4,
6 and 10, and you get 1, 2, 4 and 8. And that's no coincidence:
these algebras are a vital part of the theory.
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And it's not only objects such as circles and squares that can have
symmetry operations applied to them. Hard as it may be to envisage,
algebras have symmetries too. The collection of all symmetries of a
given shape or algebra or whatever, is called its symmetry group. In
the 19th century, the Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie
captured such symmetries using an algebraic structure that is
known nowadays as a Lie group. An example is the set of rotations of
an object in three-dimensional space. One symmetry in that set
would be a rotation that turns this magazine through 180° until it's
upside down.
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But there are five curious symmetry groups that don't fit into any
family. The very existence of these "exceptional" Lie groups, which
rejoice in the names G2, F4, E6, E7 and E8, is a puzzle and a pain to
mathematicians, who like everything to fit into some pattern or
other. One exasperated mathematician even declared them a "brutal
act of Providence".
For decades, no one could find any use for the exceptional groups,
or any reason for their existence, and it was tempting simply to
ignore them. However, it has now been realised that all five of them
can be explained in terms of the octonions. In effect, they form a
small family of their own, one with only five members. And it looks as
though the octonions actually hold together what may prove to be
the theory of everything.
Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart is a professor of mathematics based at the University of Warwick
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