School of Chemistry, third floor of the laboratory building.
Li Dong had been in Qi Yu’s research group for three days.
To be honest, the way the senior students in the group had been looking at him these past few days, it was like they were looking at some kind of deity.
You couldn’t blame them.
"East God."
A nickname that had flooded the Yan University forums.
In the eyes of students like them, even though he wasn’t a chemistry major, this great god carried the same weight as their own math professors.
Maybe even more.
And yet...
This great god had come to their research group to be an assistant?
Zhang Yu, sitting at the data console, whispered to Senior Sister Liu beside him.
"If word got out..."
"That East God came to our group to be an assistant."
"Who would believe it?"
Senior Sister Liu sighed as well.
"But it’s the truth."
"Still, East God is unbelievably brilliant..."
Their work with the SX-STM—inverting the local tensor distribution of the sample’s surface coordination field from incomplete tunneling spectroscopy data—had recently hit a snag in two places...
First, the measurement operator was too ill-conditioned. After forcing a Tikhonov regularization, the peak position of the third coordination shell was always a complete mess.
Second, they had tried three different basis function expansions, and each set produced contradictory phases.
When Zhang Yu handed over the printed data, he even gave a well-intentioned reminder.
"East God, this problem is a bit..."
"Please, take your time."
Li Dong took the paper and looked at it for about thirty seconds.
"Hmm."
"The ill-conditioned one. You’re treating the measurement operator as a compact operator."
"It isn’t actually compact."
"The contradiction with the third shell is because you used the same set of phases by default in two of your basis sets."
"You’re off by π."
As he spoke, he added a line of derivation to the paper.
Eight minutes, from start to finish.
Zhang Yu and Senior Sister Liu, standing nearby, exchanged a look.
They silently thought the same word.
’Fuck!’
Qi Yu stood nearby, arms crossed.
She wasn’t surprised. As if she wouldn’t know the level of Li Dong’s math skills.
What she was really watching for was the kid’s feel for experiments.
Initially, Qi Yu had been prepared to "babysit this great god."
But over the next two days...
Qi Yu was dumbfounded.
His first time pulling tungsten needles.
Electrochemical etching, 3 molar sodium hydroxide solution, 3.2 volts AC.
Li Dong pulled four of them in one go.
They threw them in the field ion microscope to take a look...
The tip radii were all within twenty nanometers.
The apex of one of them was only twelve atoms wide.
Brother Zhao, the group’s best needle-maker, had spent a month just to get his success rate stable at two out of ten.
This kid.
Got three out of four.
Second time, baking and outgassing the UHV chamber.
Li Dong completely ignored the foolproof procedure one of the senior students had written up.
He watched the ion pump’s current, listened to the sound of the turbomolecular pump, and manually fine-tuned the heating ramp-up curve.
The chamber’s vacuum was pumped down to 10−10 torr.
Nine hours faster than the most experienced senior in the group.
The third time, the fourth time...
Every one of Li Dong’s actions left Qi Yu more and more impressed.
Qi Yu had asked Li Dong seriously.
"Junior."
"Have you really never done experiments before?"
Li Dong was tightening a screw on the sample stage and didn’t look up.
"Senior."
"I’ve just... done a lot of ’dry-run’ training."
Qi Yu: ...
’What the hell is dry-run training?’
Qi Yu was stunned for three seconds.
She replied meekly.
"...Oh."
She turned, took out her phone, and opened her chat with the old lady.
[Qi Yu]: Teacher, don’t worry.
[Qi Yu]: This kid’s got the skills. He doesn’t need my guidance.
As for Li Dong himself...
His fingers were still resting on the screw of the sample stage.
A sense of joy he had never experienced before filled his heart.
Just as Li Dong was lost in this bliss, unable to pull himself away.
Tuesday afternoon.
On the other side of the ocean.
Princeton, Fine Hall Tower, third-floor conference room.
Inside this building, where countless specks of chalkboard dust had passed between the hands of men like Einstein and Nash, a special closed-door meeting was underway.
The *Mathematical Annals*.
Universally recognized in the world of modern mathematics as the "number one journal."
Normally, the *Annals*’ editorial board meetings were an assembly line of reviewing batches of papers and voting.
But this time...
Seven official board members.
Held a closed-door meeting for a single paper.
In the hundred-plus-year history of the *Mathematical Annals*, an event of this magnitude had happened only a handful of times.
The first time was in 1995.
Andrew Wiles took the 350-year-old Fermat’s Last Theorem from the column of legendary problems and moved it into the "proven" column.
The second time was in 2013.
An unknown lecturer named Zhang Yitang took the century-old conjecture on bounded gaps between primes and proved it to be a fact.
And this was the third time.
In the center of the long table lay a seventy-six-page printed manuscript.
Seated around it were seven top scholars who dictated the direction of modern mathematics.
Peter Sarnak, a professor at Princeton University and the absolute standard in the fields of analytic number theory and automorphic forms.
Nicholas Katz, an old-guard titan of Algebraic Geometry and l-adic cohomology.
Manjul Bhargava, a Fields Medalist and the sharpest mind working on the BSD conjecture and the class number problem for number fields.
David Gabai, a leading figure in three-dimensional topology and the current editor-in-chief.
Fernando Codá Máximo, the standard-bearer of geometric analysis.
Assaf Naor, in harmonic analysis and metric embeddings.
Camilo De Lellis, a leading figure in PDE at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Seven chairs.
Seven people.
Seventy-six pages of manuscript.
The conference room was so quiet you could hear the faint rustle of pages turning.
After a full half-minute,
Sarnak, as the senior board member, was the first to speak.
"Gentlemen."
"You have all read the paper."
"Let’s hear your thoughts."
No one spoke.
Five seconds later,
Katz was the first to smile.
"Peter."
"What thoughts are there left to say?"
"Professor Langlands’s comments are already on the table."
"I’ve been a mathematician my whole life."
"This is the first time I’ve ever seen Professor Langlands give such high praise."
Several people around the table exchanged glances.
There was no refuting it.
Bhargava pulled out the external review comments at his side and flipped through them.
"Three external reviewers."
"Langlands."
"Lafforgue."
"Wiles."
"All three, a unanimous pass."
He paused.
"And Professor Wiles has already bought a plane ticket to Huaxia."
"He should be landing today."
"What’s left to discuss?"
As Bhargava’s words fell, no one could voice a rebuttal.
Because the three names on that list carried too much weight.
Langlands, the creator of the program.
Lafforgue, the one who took Langlands’s functoriality to its conclusion in the function field case.
Wiles, the conqueror of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
They were the three highest active peaks on this research path.
When these three titans nodded in unison, there was truly no room for further discussion.
Seeing the room fall silent again,
Bhargava pulled one last A4 sheet from the stack of materials.
"Let me speak my mind."
"The paper itself is unassailable."
"I’ve read it at least a dozen times and can’t find a single flaw to attack."
"But this is what truly has me stumped."
He pushed the sheet of paper to the center of the table.
"This conjecture."
"I’ve worked on it for a whole week."
"And I have absolutely no clue."
He gave a wry smile.
"The last time I felt this way..."
"...was with BSD."
BSD.
The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.
One of the seven Millennium Prize Problems announced by the Clay Mathematics Institute.
And Bhargava himself was one of the people who had spent the last few decades hammering away the hardest at the high wall of the BSD conjecture.
For him to say, "the last time was BSD"...
...the weight of that statement was something no one at the table dared to take lightly.
Katz waved his hand.
"You’re not alone."
"I’ve been tinkering with my l-adic toolkit for a while now."
"I can’t prove it, and I can’t disprove it."
Codá Máximo also added in a low voice.
"On the geometric analysis side, I tried to approach it once using the framework of Morse theory."
"That criterion, e_v ≤ n, it’s like an iron gate I can’t pry open."
De Lellis tapped his pen on the table twice.
"On my end... I have nothing to show for my efforts."
Sarnak let out a long breath.
He looked up and scanned the room.
"Then... let’s vote."
Seven ballots.
Laid out, one by one.
All of them: Accept!
A unanimous vote.
Sarnak closed the editorial minutes in front of him.
He said quietly,
"Then it’s settled."
"Next issue."
"Front page."
As the meeting adjourned, Katz reached the doorway, then suddenly turned back to look at Sarnak.
"Peter."
"Hmm?"
"...What about the Penrose matter?"
"He didn’t even list his affiliation on the paper."
Sarnak gave a wry smile.
"What can be done?"
"Princeton’s rules are all about academic freedom."
He paused for a moment.
"Besides..."
"You know what happened with Clark and the others at the last funding meeting."
"The look on Penrose’s face when he came out of the conference room that day... I saw it from a distance. It was so dark it could have dripped ink."
"Him not listing Princeton now, isn’t that him making a statement?"
Sarnak sighed.
"I guess Penrose hasn’t gotten over it yet."
"Once he gets back from his trip to Huaxia..."
"...we’ll talk then."
Yan University, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Building Two.
In the office of the old Mrs. Zhang Lufang.
The old lady was on the phone.
An apologetic male voice came from the other end of the line.
"Sister Zhang."
"About that mathematics matter."
"We’ve already found someone."
The old lady held her phone.
She just hummed in acknowledgment.
After a few seconds,
The old lady spoke slowly.
"Alright."
"It’s good that you found someone."
Then she hung up the phone.
"...It’s good that you found someone."
The old lady repeated softly to herself.
Then she looked out the window at the row of ginkgo trees, which were just beginning to sprout new buds.

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