"Professor Wu Kai."
’Professor Wu Kai.’ Having been cramming chemistry lately, there was no way Li Dong hadn’t heard the name.
He was a titan in inorganic chemistry at the Yan University School of Chemistry, a leading figure in metal-organic frameworks and porous Coordination Chemistry who held several major special projects.
In their circle, the phrase "personally supervised by Professor Wu" was basically a guarantee of quality results.
The elderly Zhang Lufang continued speaking.
"Things have been stuck over at Hecheng. Professor Levan went over, but he’ll still need some time to find a rhythm with them."
"As for us here at Yan University, we actually had a similar plan before, so we naturally can’t just sit around and wait any longer."
"We have to keep up."
Her tone grew a little more somber as she said this.
"But there are a few things I need to make clear to you first."
"In terms of personnel, we’re not as well-equipped as the Hecheng side."
"Professor Wu’s group mainly focuses on the synthesis of framework materials. For characterization, they used to send their work out to collaborate with other groups."
"And we’re a step behind in funding, too."
"Hecheng operates under the banner of a national laboratory. Their special project funds are counted in the hundreds of millions."
"Our side... we’re on a faculty-level special project, and it was approved only after several rounds of budget cuts."
The old woman waved her hand.
"I can’t say for sure if the project will even get off the ground."
"Don’t get impatient or restless once you join."
"Take it slow, alright?"
Li Dong nodded earnestly.
When it came to research, he always dove in headfirst and with total focus. The words "impatient and restless" had nothing to do with him.
But ’take it slow’...
He thought of the countdown in the group chat.
Two years and eleven months.
That was the time left for the Fields.
He could afford to wait, but Old Fei couldn’t.
Of course, Li Dong wouldn’t say any of this to the old woman.
He simply replied earnestly.
"Teacher Zhang, don’t worry. I know what I’m doing."
The old woman grunted in acknowledgment and added a few more instructions, basically telling him to review Professor Wu Kai’s group’s representative works from the past three years so he wouldn’t show up empty-handed when they met.
Li Dong dutifully agreed.
After leaving the School of Chemistry, Li Dong stood for a moment at the top of the stairs.
Gao Wen wouldn’t be back at Yan University for a few more days.
The server room, the server itself, cooling, power supply—he’d have to wait for Gao Wen’s return to discuss the whole setup properly.
After all, this concerned a Basic artificial intelligence; Li Dong didn’t dare just buy any old server and make do.
Since he couldn’t rush things now, his thoughts naturally turned to the questions Professor Levan had asked him yesterday—something about three-group basis expansions, a phase difference of π, and the Gikhmanov regularization problem.
He was actually a little interested. Besides, he was about to join Professor Wu’s group, and the whole business of inverting characterization data was inextricably linked to applied mathematics anyway.
It lined up on both ends.
Thinking of this, he pulled out his phone and opened the Yan University academic portal.
He scrolled a couple of times on the course schedule page, looking to see if there were any applied mathematics courses he could audit.
Then, in the featured special topics section on the portal’s homepage, he saw a seminar listed in a rather large font.
Regularization Theory of Inverse Problems and Spectral Analysis of Operators
Lecturer: E Weinan.
Audience: PhD Students (By Invitation)
Time: 2:00 PM.
Location: Multipurpose Hall, 1st Floor, School of Mathematics.
Li Dong had met Academician E Weinan before. At that deployment meeting with National Power Equipment, Academician E Weinan had even asked him a question about error control.
Li Dong would remember him for the rest of his life.
’This is too much of a coincidence.’
He scrolled down another line and saw a line of small text at the very bottom.
"Undergraduates who wish to audit must contact the teaching assistant to register three days in advance."
Three days.
And it was now less than an hour until two o’clock.
There definitely wasn’t enough time.
However...
’I have special permission from the president. I can knock on any professor’s door.’
With that thought, Li Dong stuffed his phone in his pocket and turned to walk toward the School of Mathematics.
「School of Mathematics, 1st Floor Multipurpose Hall.」
The room wasn’t very large. A few long tables were arranged in a U-shape, with a handwritten blackboard at the front.
Nearly ten people were already seated around the U-shaped table.
There were men and women, the oldest in their early thirties, the youngest twenty-four or twenty-five.
Every single one of them was a current PhD student under Academician E Weinan.
Beside each person was a laptop, a binder, and a stack of scratch paper.
Two of the laptops were running numerical programs, their residual error curves ticking steadily downward.
This group of people rarely ever saw each other in the same classroom.
For the PhDs under Teacher E, daily life consisted of two things...
Either they were holed up in the computing center staring at a task queue of millions of core hours, or they were in a video call for a group meeting with a collaborating professor.
Not to mention the professor himself. Half the year he was at Princeton, and the other half he spent rotating between several research centers in the country.
For him to sit down and personally teach a small class like this for his own students was a once-a-month occasion.
So, almost everyone had a month’s worth of pent-up questions, just waiting for Academician E Weinan to arrive.
In the back two rows of the classroom sat seven or eight younger students.
They were all undergraduate auditors who had gone through the TA’s approval process half a month in advance.
A boy with glasses by the window lowered his voice and spoke to his companion.
"Getting into one of Academician E Weinan’s classes feels harder than trying to grab PetroChina stock, doesn’t it?"
The person next to him sighed as well.
"Can’t be helped."
"This was originally Academician E Weinan’s seminar for his PhD students. There were never many spots for undergrads to begin with."
"You have to submit your application to the TA for review three days in advance, and the form has to include a 300-word explanation of why you want to attend this class."
"The last time I submitted that explanation, it took me seven revisions to get it approved."
In truth, none of the undergraduate auditors sitting in the back were slouches.
There was a third-year from the School of Mathematics working on analytic number theory.
A fourth-year from the School of Physics doing numerical simulations in condensed matter.
And someone from the School of Information Science researching high-dimensional manifold learning.
It couldn’t be helped. Applied mathematics was the common pipeline that ran beneath every discipline.
Every field’s faucet was connected to it.
Just then...
CREAK.
The front door was pushed open.
Academician E Weinan walked in, carrying a briefcase.
He first looked up and scanned the students in the classroom.
There were a few more people than usual today.
Academician E Weinan smiled.
"Well now, we have quite a crowd today."
"Then let’s skip the small talk and get straight to the point."
He took an A4 sheet of paper from his briefcase.
No lesson plan, no PowerPoint, no handouts.
Several of the undergraduates in the back were visibly stunned.
They had attended E Weinan’s large lectures before. The academician was the type who always had slides flying by, with formulas covering the entire projection screen.
But now, just a single A4 sheet?
The PhD students, however, were not surprised in the least.
They all knew their professor’s seminars were never taught by the book.
The A4 paper usually listed a few problems the professor had been pondering lately, or a few obstacles he’d run into while guiding students on their projects.
He would start things off himself, then toss the conversational lead to them, asking how they would get over a certain hurdle, or if there was another way to approach a problem.
By the end of a class, the professor sometimes spoke less in total than the students.
But this was the kind of class that was truly valuable.
The seed for many papers later published in top journals was often planted in a single line of text on one of these A4 sheets.
Academician E Weinan cleared his throat.
"Today, we have three things..."
He had just begun to speak when...
KNOCK KNOCK.
There were two knocks on the back door of the classroom.
The teaching assistant poked half his face through the crack in the door, a troubled expression on it.
"Teacher E..."
"Li Dong is here."
"But he isn’t registered."

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