It’s long been a mystery why there are 3 generations of quarks and leptons: three sets of particles, apparently identical except for how they interact with the Higgs boson. It would be nice if there were some good physical explanation. Nobody knows one. Barring that, it would be nice if some beautiful mathematical structure made this pattern seem natural. That’s what my new paper is about.

It’s my third paper about exceptional algebraic structures and the Standard Model. When you classif...