Princeton, New Jersey.
While Li Dong and Liu Ruochuan were still in their hotel discussing their trip to the Huaxuan Technology headquarters the next day.
On the other side of the planet, Professor Arthur Penrose had already boarded the earliest flight out of Newark and returned to the big rural town of Princeton.
He hadn’t wanted to come back so soon.
The conversation about math with Li Dong in the hotel, which had lasted over an hour, had left him wanting more.
Especially Li Dong’s way of thinking when they discussed the distribution of zeros of L-functions—his use of physical and geometric intuition to delve into algebraic structures—left an impression that Penrose savored to this day.
It was a pure meeting of minds, with no ulterior motives.
It was simply two people who loved mathematics, sitting together and discussing their shared obsession.
Unfortunately, he’d gotten a call from the university saying the department had called a last-minute, expanded faculty committee meeting.
The topic was the allocation of research funds and adjustments to teaching positions for the next academic year, and all tenured professors were required to attend.
Penrose’s first reaction was to refuse.
But the call came from an administrative assistant in the department head’s office, and their tone made it clear this wasn’t an invitation—it was a notification.
So he had no choice but to catch the earliest flight back.
Fine Hall Tower.
This thirteen-story building on Washington Road was the headquarters of Princeton University’s math department.
Greats like Einstein and Nash had once pondered before the blackboards in this building.
But now, within this building steeped in academic legend, a meeting was underway that had nothing to do with academia.
The third-floor conference room.
The department head, Professor Rodnianski, sat at the head of the table, reading a proposal for the allocation of next year’s NSF funding among the department’s various research groups.
Penrose sat by the window, his expression grim.
"...Considering the outstanding performance of the Algebraic Geometry group in international academic evaluations in recent years, as well as the continuous expansion of its graduate student enrollment, the committee recommends increasing the annual operating budget of the Algebraic Geometry research group by 15% from its current level."
Rodnianski’s delivery was steady.
"Correspondingly, the operating budget for the Analytic Number Theory group will remain at its current level, and the application limit for the travel fund will be adjusted to the standard reimbursement cap for two international conferences per person, per year."
The two words, "remain unchanged," sounded fair enough.
But Penrose knew that with inflation, "unchanged" actually meant a cut.
This was already the third year in a row.
His Analytic Number Theory group had shrunk from six Ph.D. students three years ago to just four now. Two slots had been "optimized" and reallocated to other fields.
The travel fund had also been cut from four international conferences a year to two.
The justification was always the same: limited resources had to be directed toward "high-output fields."
’What’s a high-output field?’
’The fields that pump out a lot of papers, I suppose.’
’As for the quality of those papers... heh.’
Penrose couldn’t resist glancing at a man on the other side of the long table.
Marvin Clark.
A tenured associate professor in Princeton’s math department, specializing in Algebraic Geometry.
To be honest, Penrose had never thought much of the man’s academic contributions.
He’d published a lot of papers in Algebraic Geometry, but they were almost all "incremental research"—repackaging existing theorems with new boundary conditions—and their citation rates were pitifully low.
But the man had a knack for something Penrose could never master: networking.
Clark was a standing member of the faculty committee and also chaired the undergraduate teaching evaluation panel.
He was practically in bed with several administrative officials from the Dean’s Office.
Every Thanksgiving, he could be seen eating turkey at the same restaurant with the Vice Provost’s family.
To make matters worse, two program directors at the NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences had been his classmates in graduate school.
At a place like Princeton, academic ability was, of course, paramount.
’But in the gray areas beyond academic ability...’
Things like how funding was divided, how slots were allocated, or which students got teaching assistantships—those weren’t often decided by academic merit.
They were decided by connections.
By saying the right things to the right people in those boring committee meetings.
Penrose had always scorned such things.
In his view, a mathematician’s time should be spent on academic research, not on making pointless small talk with administrative officials at cocktail parties.
But the consequences were...
His research group’s funding was cut year after year, and his students were always at the bottom of the list for teaching assistantship assignments.
"Any questions?"
Rodnianski asked, looking at the professors in attendance.
Penrose spoke.
"I have a question."
"The Analytic Number Theory group published one paper in Advances in Mathematics and another in Mathematical Annals last year. The combined academic impact index of those two papers is higher than the sum of all papers published by the Algebraic Geometry group for the entire year."
"May I ask, on what grounds is the Algebraic Geometry group’s funding being increased by 15% while ours remains unchanged?"
The atmosphere in the conference room immediately became tense.
Clark spoke unhurriedly.
"Arthur, funding allocation is based on a comprehensive evaluation, not just a simple comparison of paper impact factors."
His tone was like he was chatting with an old friend.
"Our Algebraic Geometry group recruited three new Ph.D. students this year, and we’ve also taken on the task of reforming two core undergraduate courses."
"All of this requires resources, right?"
Penrose scoffed.
"That ’curriculum reform’ you’re talking about—didn’t you just change the names on the syllabi for Linear Algebra and Abstract Algebra and swap out a few example problems? You call that reform?"

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