O n January 8, 2007, just before 9 in the morning, a computer finished writing to disk about sixty gigabytes of files containing the Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials for the split real group G of type E8. Values at 1 of these polynomials are coefficients in characters of irreducible representations of G; so all irreducible characters were written down. The biggest coefficient appearing was 11,808,80...
