He was the only undergraduate among all the students in the room.
Li Dong smiled at him.
Gu Ming nodded back, a nervous expression on his face.
Just then, Liu Ruochuan got up and walked over, leaning in toward Li Dong.
"Kid."
"What have you been up to these past few days?"
Li Dong answered matter-of-factly.
"Oh, Professor, I’m on Professor Wu Kai’s project team."
Liu Ruochuan froze for a moment.
He knew Li Dong had been getting close with the School of Chemistry lately.
In fact, the entire Yan University knew about it.
But he hadn’t expected Li Dong to have joined Wu Kai’s group directly.
He knew Wu Kai.
What their group was working on...
Liu Ruochuan had a rough idea.
It was a problem the chemistry world hadn’t managed to truly solve for over a hundred years.
Ever since the discovery of X-rays, the question of whether one could distinguish both the element and its chemical state at the single-atom scale had been a sword of Damocles hanging over the field.
Over a dozen major research groups around the world were trying to crack it.
Domestically, Wu Kai’s team had only managed to get a foot in the door in the last two years by leveraging the SX-STM approach.
’This kid...’
’How did he just dive right into Wu Kai’s group?’
Liu Ruochuan glanced at Li Dong.
It wasn’t that he was surprised.
After mentoring Li Dong for the better part of a year, he was past the point of being surprised by any of the kid’s decisions.
He just felt like sighing.
’Why does this kid always insist on tackling the toughest problems?’
He thought for a moment but decided not to say more.
He just sighed.
"Alright."
"Put your work over there on the back burner for now."
"Let’s get today’s business here finished first."
Li Dong grunted in agreement.
Without another word, Liu Ruochuan turned and returned to his seat.
Wang Zhigang then gestured to the group of students waiting for their interviews.
"Alright, let’s begin."
"One at a time."
The first one up was a third-year doctoral student, surnamed Zou.
He had an impressive resume, with a few papers published in respectable journals.
Li Dong picked a minor problem within the Langlands Program that he knew well and asked the student to explain his understanding of it.
The student’s answer was very smooth.
So smooth it was practically word-for-word from a textbook.
After listening, Li Dong said nothing, simply shaking his head gently as he made a note on the evaluation form.
The second, the third, the fourth...
Li Dong continued to ask minor questions about the Langlands Program.
He was testing for comprehension, not rote memorization.
Li Dong didn’t know when it had started, but he had developed a very strange intuition.
He could sense it from a person’s posture, the glint in their eyes as they looked at him, the way they began their first sentence, the first keyword they used...
...he could sense whether or not a person had that "spark."
Thus, some students would give perfectly adequate answers, reciting everything from the book, and Li Dong would still shake his head.
But then another student might start to stammer, even saying something that was clearly wrong...
...yet Li Dong could tell that his stammer came from an attempt to think beyond the textbook.
His mistake came from treading a little-known path in his own mind.
And for that, Li Dong checked him off with approval.
The other professors at the table had no objections to any of Li Dong’s decisions.
The reason was simple.
When it came to the Langlands Program, no one in this room had ventured further than Li Dong.
After the first batch of candidates was done.
Only three candidates remained.
When Gu Ming’s name was called, he took a deep breath, trying his best to calm his nerves.
Li Dong glanced at Wang Zhigang.
"Professor Wang."
"Why don’t you take this one?"
"This is the person I recommended."
Wang Zhigang paused, taken aback for a second.
Then, a strange sense of reassurance washed over him.
Li Dong was recusing himself to avoid the appearance of favoritism.
Someone who understands the need to do so is a reliable person.
Wang Zhigang nodded at Gu Ming.
He chose a rather specific sub-problem within the Langlands field.
"Gu Ming, please discuss the localization of the geometric Satake equivalence on Hecke eigensheaves."
Hearing the question, Gu Ming didn’t answer right away. Instead, he thought for about a minute before he began to speak.
He didn’t follow the conventional main thread of geometric Satake, convolution categories, and Langlands duality.
Instead, he started with geometric Satake but then made a conceptual leap to the double affine duality on the side of affine Hecke algebras, as given by Bezrukavnikov.
From that double affine duality, he then circled back to the localization of Hecke eigensheaves.
It wasn’t the most direct route, but that leap showed real ingenuity.
Upon hearing Gu Ming’s conceptual leap, the professors in the room all nodded to themselves in approval.
Li Dong was also listening intently.
’This kid... he didn’t let me down.’
Another intuitive person answering this question would likely have stuck to the main thread, explained the textbook material in full, and that would have been a passing answer.
But Gu Ming didn’t stick to the main thread.
He took a path he himself chose to take.
This path could be found in textbooks.
Bezrukavnikov’s work wasn’t obscure, either.
But the vast majority of doctoral students would not have proactively linked it with the localization of Hecke eigensheaves.
Li Dong was satisfied with Gu Ming’s answer.
The other professors in the room also nodded slightly.
Wang Zhigang grunted in acknowledgment.
"Gu Ming, please go wait over there for a moment."
Gu Ming got up and moved to the side.
As he walked past Li Dong’s desk, Li Dong gave him a slight nod by tilting his chin up.
Gu Ming managed a nervous smile.
The next candidate called up was Fu Chen.
Wang Zhigang’s master’s student.
When he reached the chair, he gently nudged it closer to the table before sitting down.
Watching his small gesture, Li Dong had already begun to score him in his mind.

Comments

Loading...