Fascinating effort to formalize a medieval treatise - De Luce (“On Light”, written around 1225) - about the origins of the universe into modern mathematics. What the researchers discovered and why they did this is explained at The Ordered Universe Project.
http://ordered-universe.com/
Their paper on this was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society but can be found on arXiv.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.0769