Winter break at the university officially began on January 13th. Although a few exams were still scattered across the schedule, students from departments that had already finished were dragging their suitcases and heading home.
In dorm room 404, Li Dong stood in front of the mirror, trying his best to look like a "good student."
"Brother Dong, why are you looking so sharp today?"
Wang Hao asked, lying on the top bunk.
Liu Qiang chimed in.
"Brother Dong, don’t tell me you got a girlfriend?"
Li Dong shot him a glare.
"What girlfriend? My mom’s arriving today."
"Huh? Your mom’s coming to the Capital City?" Wang Hao’s eyes lit up.
"Yeah, her flight gets in around noon. I’m going to the airport to pick her up."
Li Dong finished getting his things together, then turned to the other three.
"Oh, right. I’m treating you guys to dinner tonight. So don’t say anything stupid."
At these words, the three animals immediately erupted in cheers.
"Brother Dong is the man! Don’t worry, my lips are sealed."
Li Dong gave a dismissive wave and walked out.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Li Qin in several months.
Li Qin’s condition during their last phone call had worried him. Even though she insisted nothing was wrong, Li Dong knew his mom; she wasn’t the type to suddenly rush over to the Capital City for no reason.
’Whatever. I’ll find out when I see her.’
Leaving the dorm, Li Dong headed toward the main university gate.
’He mentally plotted his route to the subway station... ’First, take Line 4 to Xizhimen...’
Just then, a voice suddenly called out from behind him.
"Li Dong!"
Li Dong turned to look.
He saw a white-haired foreigner in his sixties standing not far away.
Behind him was a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman, Sarah.
"Professor Penrose?"
Li Dong was stunned for a moment, then a smile spread across his face.
"What are you doing here?"
Arthur Penrose strode forward, extending a hand to shake Li Dong’s.
"I’ve been wandering around your campus. I can’t believe I actually ran into you!"
Penrose spoke rapidly, clearly very excited.
In fact, he had already been at Yan University for several days.
After flying from Newark and landing in the Capital City, he hadn’t even taken the time to recover from jet lag before heading straight to Yan University.
But things hadn’t been as simple as he’d imagined.
Although he had come on a "private academic visit" and hadn’t gone through the official exchange channels at Princeton, there were still necessary procedures to follow upon his arrival at Yan University.
It wasn’t that Yan University was deliberately making things difficult for him.
The main reason was...
Li Dong’s current status was simply too sensitive.
The version 2.1 dimensionality reduction algorithm was directly tied to Huaxuan Technology’s lithography control system, and behind that lay National Power Equipment’s entire semiconductor strategy.
Liu Ruochuan’s message to Penrose had been very polite.
It was not convenient to arrange direct contact at the moment; more time was needed to go through the proper channels.
Penrose, for his part, didn’t mind too much.
Although he was a man dedicated to pure academia, after several decades at Princeton, he’d seen his fair share of how the world works.
He understood how these things worked...
So, he hadn’t been idle for the past few days.
While waiting, he took the opportunity to wander around the Yan University campus, even slipping into a few classrooms to audit some undergraduate courses.
And in doing so, he discovered some rather interesting things.
Undergraduate education at Yan University was very different from that at Princeton.
The students here had an incredibly solid foundation.
Science undergraduates at Princeton learn a bit of everything in their first two years. Their general education is very comprehensive, but they often don’t truly begin to focus on their major until their junior year.
As a result, you’d see juniors and seniors still having to flip through books to look up formulas while solving problems. In scientific fields that require a strong, cumulative foundation, their fundamental skills were clearly not on par with the students here.
But Yan University was different.
Here, students were trained in their specialty from the moment they enrolled.
The curriculum was dense and the assessments were rigorous, so their foundational knowledge was extremely deep.
In the Real-Valued Function class Penrose audited, the reaction speed of the sophomores would be on par with upperclassmen, or even first-year graduate students, at Princeton.
Of course, there were downsides too.
The breadth of interdisciplinary studies was lacking.
Princeton’s preceptorial system and interdisciplinary curriculum genuinely enabled students to develop a broader academic perspective, while the students at Yan University could sometimes seem a bit more limited in their cross-domain thinking.
But what impressed Penrose the most wasn’t the difference in pedagogical models.
It was the spirit of the students.
Their eyes were bright.
They were full of hope for the future.
In universities in the United States, however, many students were saddled with tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of US Dollars in student loans the moment they set foot on campus.
They didn’t wake up each day thinking about their academic pursuits or research, but about whether they could find a job after graduation to pay off their loans.
That sense of uncertainty about the future could extinguish the light in a young person’s eyes.
But it was different here.
Although these Yan University students faced all sorts of pressures, they possessed something Penrose hadn’t seen in a long time.
Hope.
"Professor Penrose, I’m so sorry, but I really have to go now."
Li Dong explained his situation to Penrose.
He was truly in a hurry.
Li Qin’s flight was arriving at twelve o’clock sharp, and it was already 9:30 AM. The subway ride from campus to Capital International Airport would take over an hour.
The excitement on Penrose’s face instantly gave way to disappointment.
’He had waited for so many days, and after finally, fortunately, running into Li Dong on campus, the young man was just leaving?’
Li Dong noticed the old professor’s disappointment.
He thought for a moment, then gave a knowing grin.
"Professor Penrose, if you can wait a few days, I’ll show you something really fun."
’Fun?’
Penrose’s eyebrows shot up.
"Really fun?"
"Trust me, you’re going to love it."
With that, Li Dong waved to him and dashed toward the campus gate.
Penrose stood rooted to the spot, momentarily stunned.
Sarah walked up to him and said with a helpless air.
"Professor, was he just giving you the runaround?"
"No."
Penrose shook his head.
"That young man isn’t the type for empty pleasantries."
"If he says it’s fun, then it must truly be fun."
Penrose certainly didn’t believe the young man would try to fob him off with something boring.
Something a nineteen-year-old genius who had published as first author in the *Mathematical Annals* considered "fun" was bound to be anything but simple.
And the "fun thing" Li Dong had mentioned was, of course, the project he was preparing to work on with Yang Shengguo.
The generalization of local-global compatibility for automorphic representations from GL2 to GL(n).
This was actually an idea given to him by Liu Ruochuan.
Everyone knew that Professor Penrose had come for Li Dong.
But it was impossible to allow an American professor to participate in the dimensionality reduction algorithm 2.1 project, at least for the next several years.
No matter how impeccable Professor Penrose’s academic integrity was, that was a hard line that could not be crossed.
So, what was to be done?
They couldn’t just have a top scholar in number theory fly thousands of miles to the Capital City just to audit a few classes, could they?
They had to give him a reason to stay.
And this GL2 to GL(n) project was the perfect hook.
This field of study had nothing to do with the dimensionality reduction algorithm. It was a purely theoretical, cutting-edge problem in number theory and involved no sensitive technologies.
But its academic weight was more than enough to entice a scholar of Penrose’s caliber.
「Meanwhile.」
In Tian Gang’s office at the Yan University School of Mathematical Sciences.
Tian Gang stared at a commentary on his computer screen, his face dark.
*A Commentary on the Omitted Intermediate Steps in the Li Clan’s Proof of Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association and the Applicability of the Zero Criterion to GL(n) Automorphic Representations*
Author: Zhou Shenzhi.
Tian Gang read the commentary from start to finish three times.
’Trying to play the academic bully with me?’
’He’s just playing with my leftovers.’

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