He didn’t rush back to Yan University. Instead, he took a detour to the Center for Mathematical Sciences.
Mr. Qiu’s office was on the third floor.
The old man and the young man sat inside for less than ten minutes. Their conversation revolved entirely around the Langlands Capping Research Group...
Mr. Qiu mostly asked the questions, and Li Dong answered.
Overall, things were progressing steadily.
At one point, Mr. Qiu casually brought something up.
"I heard your side has produced some results?"
He was referring to Fu Chen’s paper, "Anomalous Residuals of Cyclic L-factors and the Persistence Correspondence of Local Dimensions of Deformation Rings."
Li Dong nodded.
"Yes, we’re submitting it the week after next."
"The main structure of the paper is solid. There aren’t any major issues."
Mr. Qiu just hummed in acknowledgment and didn’t say anything more, simply lifting his teacup for a sip.
Even when Li Dong stood up to leave, Mr. Qiu never mentioned the matter of having him give a public lecture at Shuimu.
It wasn’t necessary anymore. They were family now. Even if he didn’t bring it up, Li Dong would go on his own.
After leaving Mr. Qiu’s office, he went to Gui Gen Residence.
Just as he reached the bottom of the stairs, he ran into Dr. Weng, who was on his way down.
As soon as Dr. Weng saw him, he quickly waved his hands and said in a hushed voice that Mr. Yang hadn’t been feeling well the past couple of days and was taking a nap.
Li Dong took the hint and nodded, deciding not to disturb Mr. Yang. But inside, he grew even more worried about Mr. Yang’s health.
By the time he got back to Yan University, it was just after three in the afternoon.
The dormitory was mostly empty because of the break.
When Li Dong returned to his room, the roommates who hadn’t gone home were also out.
Speaking of which, Liu Ruochuan had talked to him about the dorm situation before, asking if he wanted to apply for a private doctoral student dormitory.
It would be quieter and more convenient for research.
Li Dong had decisively refused.
’What a joke.’
’Given my tendency to sit for over ten hours at a time, pulling all-nighters without batting an eye...’
’If I really moved into a single room, I’d probably starve to death in front of my keyboard one day.’
After hearing his opinion, Liu Ruochuan never brought up the matter of changing dorms again.
Li Dong walked to his desk and opened his laptop.
Xiaohai was still bouncing in its usual spot, but the progress bar above its head had changed to 0.01.
This meant it was still performing derivative understanding.
Next, Li Dong pulled a stack of notes he had accumulated over the past two days from his drawer.
The notes were filled with questions he wanted to ask Gao Wen.
They concerned several critical nodes in the SNN derivation process.
Some were boundary conditions he couldn’t figure out on his own.
Others were points where he suspected hidden issues were buried at the model level.
A few others were ideas that had suddenly popped into his head while working; he wasn’t sure if they were viable and needed to ask someone.
The problem was, ever since his last visit to Yan University, Gao Wen had been in Peng City. According to Liu Ruochuan, he was supposedly working on a major national project.
It wasn’t that Li Dong hadn’t considered taking these questions to other professors.
But ultimately, all these questions were related to Xiaohai.
If he went to another professor, it would be difficult to explain if they dug too deep.
But if he didn’t go deep enough, he wouldn’t be able to solve the real problems.
’What can I do?’
’I can only wait.’
Li Dong sighed, took out his phone, and opened the Cyan Dragon Study Group chat.
The group had been relatively quiet lately.
Only Newton would occasionally post updates on the new Xiaohai’s condition.
For example, that it was a competent assistant, but it was not a living being.
He had even asked Li Dong questions about the new Xiaohai.
Li Dong had just glanced at them guiltily before unhesitatingly scrolling past.
Then, Li Dong took another look at his own function panel.
File Transfers: 1.
’Only one left.’
He mulled it over.
Wu Kai’s group’s issue was already solved. He could have totally used his "Comment" to fleece Gikhmanov, but in the end, he decided against it.
After all, he had to save this last file transfer. What if something more urgent came up?
And as Li Dong saved this last chance as a safety net, the "Comment" posted on arXiv was seeping into every capillary of the field in a much deeper way.
The initial arguments had already passed.
The uproar that had spread from arXiv to X, that wave of table-pounding indignation—’I’ve worked on this for twenty years and couldn’t figure it out, so what gives you the right to dissect it at twenty?’—had recently become a common topic of conversation for everyone in the inverse problems field.
But after the excitement died down, the real work slowly began.
The first to make a move was Bram De Vries from Amsterdam.
A few days prior, he had only posted a single handwritten page on X.
This time, he had formally written out that handwritten page into a short paper and posted it on arXiv.
"An Equivalent Integral Form of the Li Criterion and Its Dual Characterization."
It was short, only eleven pages long.
But in those eleven pages, he had rewritten Li Dong’s original three-line open-interval criterion directly into an integral criterion that didn’t depend on step-size selection.
Engineers couldn’t understand the three-line formula.
But they could understand an integral criterion.
The night this short paper was posted, a certain domestic company that produces industrial inversion software held an emergency meeting.
The very next day, someone posted the first line of rewritten code on the company’s internal forum.
The next to act was Jack Sutton from Durham University.
He did something even more drastic.
He dug up all the top one hundred most-cited papers in the inverse problems field from the past fifteen years that used that little cyclic weight trick.
He went through them one by one, measuring each against the Li Criterion.
One hundred papers in two weeks.
He posted a table on his research group’s wiki.

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