Many people responded about E8.  Several who mentioned the same
site mentioned below by Baez are not included here.
Below all this is a job posting..............DMD
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Subject: Re: Question about E8
From: Tim Porter <t.porter@bangor.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:21:28 +0000

> From: Clarence W Wilkerson Jr <wilker@math.purdue.edu>
> Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:12:27 -0500
>
> For the list:
>
> Does anyone have a clear mathematical explanation of what puzzle  of E8 
being solved that
> AIM, MIT, NPR, NY Times, CNN, etc blasted us with early this week? I 
like to see
> publicity about math, but this all seemed pretty mystical to me!
>
> Clarence Wilkerson
>
Dear All
I did find this page.  It does not say much,,

http://www.aimath.org/E8/

Tim Porter
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Subject: Re: Question about E8
From: John Baez <baez@math.ucr.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:13:43 -0700

Try my blog entry at the n-category cafe:

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2007/03/news_about_e8.html

and the various links and comments.

Best,
jb
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Subject: Re: Question about E8
From: Peter Landweber <landwebe@math.rutgers.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:57:58 -0400

A response to Clarence:

One might check under News on the AMS web site, or head straight to 
http://aimath.org/E8/ , to see what this is all about.  There should be a 
genuine explanation, one would hope (although I initially tuned out prior 
to getting that far).  Prowling a bit further, one probably  wants to look 
at the "details of the calculation" and David Vogan's "narrative" 
available at
http://www.liegroups.org/ .

Peter
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Subject: Re: Question about E8
From: John Martino <john.martino@wmich.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:48:09 -0400

For the list:

All the publicity is about the calculation of the Kazhdan-Lusztig 
polynomials for E_8 for the Atlas of Lie Groups. The web site is 
<http://atlas.math.umd.edu/>

John Martino
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Subject: Re: Question about E8
From: Jeff Strom <jeff.strom@wmich.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:18:00 -0400

I believe they worked out the character table.

Jeff