Why is 8 so special?

Question

I have been reading about multi-dimensional numbers, and found out that it's been proven that the Octonions are the composition algebra of the largest dimension. I was wondering why, despite having infinitely many different dimensions of numbers, the only composition algebras are of 1, 2, 4, and 8 dimensions. What's so special about 8?

Answer 1

You might be interested in Hurwitz's proof of his theorem (which is not as strong as Wikipedia's statement). Here is the original German and an English translation. The maximal $n$ turns out to be the solution of $2^{n-2} = n^2$.

Answer 2

Your information is wrong: tessarines of any $2^n$ dimension (for instance, 16-dimensional tessarines) is a commutative, associative, composition algebra.