Jiangcheng Seventh Middle School, Class 4, Year One.
Yang Shengguo turned around, pointing a finger at the function he had just written on the blackboard.
"There’s only one key point to this problem: you have to be clear on the domain of the logarithmic function and its relationship to the set."
He was just about to move on to the next step.
"Remember, A is a subset of B, which means every element in A must also be in B..."
Just then, there was a KNOCK KNOCK at the back door of the classroom.
The students all turned their heads in unison.
Director Zheng was standing at the door, waving.
"Old Yang, sorry to interrupt."
"Principal Wang wants you in his office. The people from Jiangcheng Education Channel are here. They want to do an exclusive interview with you."
The words had barely left his mouth when an uproar erupted from below the lectern.
"Holy shit, they’re interviewing Teacher Yang?"
"Is it about that thing in Sunshine Hall?"
"No way, that was ages ago..."
Yang Shengguo himself was taken aback.
He’d never done anything in his life worth being interviewed for.
If he had to name something that might warrant an ’interview-level’ event, it would be the paper he worked on with Li Dong and Penrose.
’But that doesn’t make sense,’ he thought. ’The timing is all wrong.’
He knew the review process for *Mathematical Annals*—it was measured in years.
Even if the paper was truly significant, it couldn’t possibly be this fast. After all, the more important a paper, the more rigorous the verification process.
"Alright, class, turn to page 56 and review Example 3 on your own."
"I’ll be checking the practice problem below it when I get back."
With that, he followed Director Zheng out of the classroom.
The hallway was empty.
Yang Shengguo asked as they walked.
"Old Zheng, what’s really going on?"
Zheng Hua could barely contain his grin.
"Did you or did you not work on a paper with that kid, Li Dong?"
Yang Shengguo’s heart skipped a beat. He nodded.
"Yes."
"It was published?"
"It was published."
Zheng Hua continued.
"The Education Channel people are already crammed into the principal’s office."
"After they interview you, Principal Wang is taking you to the Education Bureau to report to the leadership."
Yang Shengguo’s mouth fell open and stayed that way for a moment.
He’d never imagined the paper would be published so quickly.
Zheng Hua was genuinely thrilled.
Since its founding, Jiangcheng Seventh Middle School had barely managed to publish a few papers in ’C-list’ journals.
But now...
*Annals*, one of the top four journals.
And one of its authors was from their very own Jiangcheng Seventh Middle School.
This time, Seventh Middle was really about to take off.
And the first person to fly would most likely be Principal Wang, who was sitting in that office right now.
’If Principal Wang gets promoted because of this, then what about me? It should be my turn to fill his position, right?’
The more Zheng Hua thought about it, the harder it became to suppress his smile.
At that very moment, the entire nation of Huaxia was in an uproar over the paper.
As usual, the quickest to react were the short-video bloggers.
This time, however, there were far fewer clickbait accounts.
The reason was simple: they had nothing to plagiarize, and they couldn’t understand the material anyway.
The two words "Langlands Program" weren’t a household name like the "Riemann Hypothesis".
Most ordinary netizens had never even heard of Robert Langlands. They certainly didn’t know the man was nearly ninety and still working at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
So this time, the bloggers who rushed to explain it to the public were all people with real expertise.
A certain math popularizer with over a million followers found his hands shaking as he recorded a video.
"Hey everyone, I was originally planning to talk about the Banach-Tarski Paradox today."
"But I’m changing the topic, because just a few hours ago, the official website of *Mathematical Annals* posted a new paper."
He panned the camera over to his computer screen so his viewers could get a clear look.
*A pair-correlation criterion for local-global compatibility of automorphic representations of GL(n)*
(Li Dong - Yan University, Arthur Penrose, Yang Shengguo - Jiangcheng Seventh Middle School)
The blogger paused for two seconds and took a deep breath.
"Let me translate this title and tell you what this paper has accomplished."
"Back in 2010, two mathematicians here in our country managed to prove the local-global compatibility for GL(2) in cases where the ramification index was less than or equal to 2."
"As for who those two were, I won’t say, because there’s some controversy surrounding it."
"At the time, everyone in the field thought that continuing down this path would take at least a generation."
"Until this year."
"Li Dong, an undergraduate from Yan University’s Yuanpei College, took this result..."
The blogger’s voice trembled slightly.
"And expanded it from GL(2) to GL(n)."
"From a ramification index of ≤2 to a ramification index of ≤n."
"And on top of that, he provided the sufficient conditions for the fully ramified case."
"His method is completely different from his predecessors’."
"Others took the old path of the Arthur-Selberg Trace Formula—purely algebraic."
"He took the path of zero-point statistics of automorphic L-functions... which is analytic."
"To put it in layman’s terms: for the last hundred years, all the titans working in this field were calculating."
"Li Dong didn’t calculate. He counted."
"He counted 1023 zeros."
At this point, the blogger couldn’t help but let out a small laugh.
"What does that even mean? In the entire history of verifying the Riemann Hypothesis, the combined total number of zeros counted by everyone—the previous record—was just a little over 1013."
"Li Dong pushed that number forward by ten full orders of magnitude in one go."
"Then he took those 1023 zeros and used them like a computable probe to poke at the very foundations of the Langlands Program."
"And he succeeded."
On camera, the blogger rubbed his eyes.
"I’m speaking from the heart here."
"I’ve been popularizing math in this country for five or six years now."
"I never thought I’d see the day when a single paper would get me so excited my mind would go blank."

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