Mathematician Michael Rios and physicist David Chester walk around the UCLA campus discussing a mathematical object called an "operad" that seems very helpful in the study of scattering amplitudes. There is a revolution in physics taking place that makes use of combinatorical mathematics, and this greatly simplifies the calculation of scattering amplitudes by replacing the computation of hundreds of Feynman diagrams with an object called an associahedron.
Our friends Michael and David are not members of the Quantum Gravity Research team, and are both working on their own models, some relating closely to E8, a mathematical object we use in our work, and we like to highlight the work of our colleagues working on similar problems as we are.