A fiendishly complicated mathematical challenge has finally been conquered by mathematicians.

The team has exhaustively explored an esoteric 248-dimension structure called E₈ and the results take up 60 gigabytes of data. If written out in tiny print, the results would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

"E₈ was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood," says the team leader Jeffrey Adams from the University of Maryland in College Park, US.

E₈ (pronounced E-eight) is an example of a so-called Lie group. A Norwegian mathematician invented Lie groups in the 19th century to study symmetry. A Lie group underlies objects like balls, cylinders or cones that are symmetrical when rotated by small amounts.