After showing off for... er... asking Director Liu for a leave of absence.
Li Dong fell back into his old routine.
Go to class, return to his dorm, and then grind away at Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association.
That evening, in dorm room 404.
Li Dong stared at a screen filled with formulas for Functional Analysis and contour integration, his brow furrowed deeply.
’Just grinding away at the error bound is still too slow...’
Li Dong didn’t know how far he needed to push the boundary for the "group" to return to normal, so he had no choice but to keep at it.
’I’ve only just pushed past the absolute value α=1 deadline, but if I want to keep expanding the interval, it involves estimating the remainder terms of high-power primes...’
’Looks like I’ll have to keep refining the Fourier optimization framework. I’ll need to combine it with the massive 10^23-scale sample of non-trivial zero data I’ve generated to scale the remainder term at the limit...’
Just as he was completely absorbed, vaguely grasping a thread of inspiration and preparing to dig deeper...
CLICK.
The dorm room door was pushed open.
Wang Hao walked in from outside, looking at Li Dong with a strange expression on his face.
Li Dong looked up and saw his expression, and a chill ran down his spine.
"Haozi, what’s wrong?"
Wang Hao asked tentatively.
"Brother Dong... back in high school, did you used to fail your monthly math exams?"
Hearing this, Li Dong’s face instantly darkened.
’What’s that supposed to mean?’
’Me? Li Dong! The top student from Yan University Yuanpei! The guy who just published a top-tier paper as first author in *Mathematics of Computation*, the pinnacle of the field! The big shot who’s making waves across the entire international analytic number theory community... failed math?’
’Yes, I did!’
’So what? That’s not my dark past; it’s the path that brought me here!’
With a dark expression, Li Dong gave a very reluctant nod.
Seeing him admit it, Wang Hao’s mouth twitched. He then continued to ask.
"Then... are you really a rich second-generation kid who’s been hiding it all along?"
"Bullshit!"
Li Dong shot up from his chair.
He could tolerate other things, but this was one thing he absolutely could not stand!
"Who are you calling a what?"
"I earned that money with my own two hands! I’m a self-made man, okay?!"
Li Dong glared at Wang Hao and said.
"Haozi, what the hell is wrong with you today? Did you forget to take your meds? Why are you suddenly asking all these bizarre questions?"
Wang Hao let out a long sigh and handed his phone over.
"Brother Dong, you know how people online have been hyping you up just to tear you down? I think I finally found the source."
"I already went and cussed out their entire family tree in the comments. The rest... you should see for yourself."
After speaking, Wang Hao, looking completely drained, slowly climbed onto his bottom bunk and buried himself in the shadows, muttering despairingly.
"Oh god... I actually lost to someone who used to fail high school math... I can’t go on studying like this..."
Li Dong ignored Wang Hao, picking up the phone with intrigued interest.
Playing on the screen was a video from a pair of overseas science communicators called "Old Yao and Xiaowei."
In the video, a man and a woman were sitting at a table, chattering away at the camera.
"...So, you see, things that people find incredible are usually just things they don’t understand."
"Student Li Dong’s algorithm is very impressive, but it’s not quite at the level of revolutionizing the field of analytic number theory..."
Old Yao really "knew his stuff."
"Previously, the international record for verifying all non-trivial zeros was only up to 10^13. But with student Li Dong’s algorithm, Professor Jiang’s team at Capital University has already pushed that to 10^17. It’s truly remarkable."
"Although Professor Arthur Penrose of Princeton has said that there’s no point in just grinding out more non-trivial zeros, and that even old algorithms could achieve a similar magnitude on modern hardware."
"But, this was accomplished independently by student Li Dong, which makes it even more remarkable."
Old Yao lavished Li Dong with a torrent of backhanded compliments.
"I also looked into student Li Dong’s family. As expected of such an outstanding individual, his family is outstanding as well."
"His uncle is the big boss of a large domestic manufacturing plant! And his mother is the CFO of that very company!"
"Most importantly, their family’s company is currently contract manufacturing core components for Huaxuan Technology, a subsidiary of the National Power Group!"
"So student Li Dong’s current achievements are inseparable from his excellent family upbringing."
Then Old Yao went on to praise how Li Dong used to fail math but, through his own hard work, took off in just one short year...
The video was filled with all sorts of leading statements.
Seeing this, Li Dong was completely stunned. However...
"What the fuck?"
’My uncle’s factory is already awesome enough to be making core components for Huaxuan Technology?’
’Is Lin Wei that much of a bro? He gave the core components contract directly to my uncle?’
This made Li Dong’s opinion of Lin Wei improve considerably.
Li Dong opened his uncle Li Yang’s WeChat Moments.
He quickly scrolled through his uncle’s recent posts, which were meant to promote the company’s capabilities.
In the photos, the factory floor was indeed bigger and the machines were new, but the things they were manufacturing...
Nuts, washers, non-standard stamped parts... It was all just the most peripheral stuff!
It didn’t have a damn thing to do with the two words "core components"!
"Damn it!"
Li Dong couldn’t help but curse out loud.
"Got me all excited for nothing! I really thought my uncle had made it big!"
Li Dong shook his head and tossed the phone back to Wang Hao, treating the entire video as a joke.
The two people in the video clearly didn’t even understand the significance of the algorithm. In the eyes of scholars who actually knew the field, the ramblings of these buffoons weren’t worth a fart.
However, these people had spread rumors about his family and gotten his hopes up for nothing. Li Dong was never one to take an insult lying down.
’Since you claim that old algorithms can achieve a similar magnitude on modern hardware...’
’Fine, then.’
Li Dong opened his browser and logged into arXiv, the world’s largest academic pre-print server.
He had no intention of publishing the complete version of his refined dimensional reduction algorithm 2.0.
After all, it was his core weapon for tackling Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association. The project was at a critical phase, and the algorithmic details absolutely could not be leaked.
So, he spent less than twenty minutes typing up a short paper.
The title was simple and brutal: [A Computed Dataset of Non-Trivial Zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function (to the order of 10^23 for t)].
The abstract contained only a single sentence: "This paper discloses a computed dataset of non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function, covering the interval for the imaginary part t up to the order of 10^23. All zeros have been dually verified using the Riemann-Siegel formula and the argument principle."
The body of the paper offered only a simple one-line description—"Utilizes my optimized numerical integration and exponential sum estimation algorithm"—without revealing a single detail.
Finally, he attached the dataset containing the most representative non-trivial zeros at the 10^23 scale as a supplementary file to the paper.
’Since you think the old algorithms can do it, why don’t you try using them to reproduce data of this magnitude?’
Li Dong hit the enter key, completing the submission to arXiv.
As for his core algorithm?
Are you kidding? That was his ace in the hole. Why would he show it to a bunch of clowns?
After taking care of all that, Li Dong casually gave his uncle, Li Yang, a call.
He made some small talk, hung up, and went straight to bed.

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