Chapter 174 - 130: A Grand Display
After a moment of thought, Chen Lin replied politely.
Chen Lin: [Thank you for the recommendation, Academician Liang. It’s an honor to have Professor Qiu’s approval.]
The two exchanged a few more messages on WeChat. Between the lines, Liang Tianshi’s words were filled with the earnest care and deep expectations of an elder for a junior.
Finally, Academician Liang mentioned that he was getting on in years and needed to rest early. Chen Lin thoughtfully replied, [Please take care of yourself. I look forward to meeting you at the mathematics conference.]
He had just put his phone down and hadn’t even had a chance to catch his breath when the screen lit up again.
This time, it was Professor Gongtan. The message’s style was just like the man himself—blunt and to the point.
Gongtan: [You’ve probably heard the news, kid. That joint project between the Science and Technology University and Yannan ran into some trouble with the math, so I recommended you.]
[You’d better do a good job. Don’t make me lose face.]
The words had barely registered when Chen Lin was added to a WeChat group named [New Energy Solid-State Battery Joint Task Force].
He tapped into the group and casually scrolled through the member list. He saw that most people had already changed their group nicknames to a neat, uniform format, like [Yannan-Materials-XXX] or [SciTech-Computer-XXX].
A quick scan was all it took for Chen Lin to get the picture.
𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢
’Wow, this is quite the setup.’
It didn’t just span two universities, Yannan and the Science and Technology University, but also five or six different disciplines: materials science, chemical engineering, energy, electrical engineering, and computer science.
He quickly changed his own nickname to [Yannan-Mathematics-Chen Lin].
After changing his nickname, he took another careful look at the member list. An amusingly frustrating discovery made him raise an eyebrow.
Among the members from Yannan University participating in the project, he was the only one from the School of Mathematics—a one-man army.
Never mind a professor; there wasn’t even a PhD or graduate student to assist him.
On the other hand, the team from the Science and Technology University included not only Professor Gongtan but also his two PhD students, You Lie and Lv Yi, whom Chen Lin had met during the Huanrun Pharmaceutical project.
Chen Lin immediately started grumbling to himself.
’No wonder Dean Zhuang was so polite earlier. They probably couldn’t find any professor willing to take on this drudgery, but they still wanted the School of Mathematics to have a presence in the project, so they just threw me into the fire!’
’He didn’t mind, though, as long as he was getting paid.’
Just then, a new message popped up in the group.
SciTech-Mathematics-Gongtan: [@SciTech-Materials-Professor Tang Xuebing, this is the Chen Lin I was telling you about. I’ve added him to the group.]
[Have him take a look at the problem you guys are having. If he can’t solve it, then I guess I’ll have to swallow my pride and go find Feng Yunhai for you in the Imperial Capital.]
SciTech-Materials-Tang Xuebing: [Hahaha, alright, alright, thanks for the help, Professor Gong! @Yannan-Mathematics-Chen Lin Hello, Chen Lin, welcome aboard!]
Immediately after, Professor Tang Xuebing tagged Chen Lin in another message.
SciTech-Materials-Tang Xuebing: [I’ve heard a lot about you, Chen Lin. I also saw the news report about you from a while back. We have the utmost confidence in your mathematical skills.]
[Here’s the plan: the person in charge of the project on the Yannan University side is Professor Lu Zhongqi from the School of Chemistry. As for the problem we need you to solve, you can start by looking over the relevant materials Professor Lu will provide.]
The moment Professor Tang’s message appeared, another profile picture in the group lit up.
Yannan-Chemical Engineering-Lu Zhongqi: [@Yannan-Mathematics-Chen Lin Let’s talk privately, Chen Lin.]
Chen Lin immediately received a friend request. After he accepted, the other person quickly sent a message, concisely arranging a time and place to meet: 2:30 tomorrow afternoon, in Room 301 of Experiment Building A at the School of Chemistry.
With all that settled, Chen Lin glanced at the time in the top-right corner of his phone. It was almost twelve o’clock.
He stretched, and his bones let out a series of crisp cracks.
’Since I have to go to the university tomorrow afternoon, maybe I’ll... drop by the company in the morning, just to show my face and see how everyone’s doing.’
Having made up his mind, he thought no more of it. He tossed his phone onto the nightstand, threw himself onto the bed spread-eagled, rolled over, and fell into a deep sleep.
...
What Chen Lin didn’t know, however, was that as he drifted off to sleep, a storm of his own making was already sweeping across the globe, crossing time zones at an unimaginable speed.
Countless editors and writers, from both mainstream and independent media, were staring at a PDF they couldn’t hope to understand. They frantically tore at their already sparse hair, wracking their brains to figure out how on earth they were going to write their next headline.
"Differential Manifold boundaries? Hallucination control? What the hell is any of this? Can someone please explain it to me in plain English?"
"Is the editor-in-chief insane? Asking an entertainment writer like me to report on a mathematics paper? I’ve forgotten everything from Calculus!"
"No, I have to go on Zhihu right now, find some math expert, and pay them to explain this paper’s abstract to me... no, not just explain, explain it like I’m a fifth grader!"
The storm first erupted within a relatively small, closed circle.
On the internal forums of top university math departments, in academic mailing lists, and across social media accounts known only to insiders, a single topic began to circulate at almost the exact same time: page twenty of the latest issue of JAMS.
[On the Boundary of Differential Manifolds in Generative Models and the Control of Hallucinations]
A high-quality paper in a top journal, on its own, wouldn’t have been enough to cause such a tremor.
What truly sent a chill down the spines of the mathematicians, scholars, and PhD students who followed the academic world was a short, powerful comment from a reviewer at the end of the paper.
[This is a groundbreaking work. We have finally found a clear path to solving the hallucination problem in large generative models, which until now has been a black box. —Prof. Terence Chi-Shen Tao]
Terence Tao!
In the world of mathematics, that name alone was a legend.
To be fair, Terence Tao, known for his mild-mannered and friendly personality, was not famous for being a sharp-tongued reviewer of his colleagues’ work.
Unlike luminaries such as Pierre Deligne, he would never use acrimonious and harsh language to tear an author’s work to shreds.
But in the eyes of many academic journal editors, Terence Tao was, for authors, even more fearsome than those notoriously harsh professors.
Because most of the time he reviewed a colleague’s paper, his feedback consisted of a single word: Rejection.
His brain, hailed as "the smartest in the world," could always pinpoint oversights—or even fatal flaws—in a paper’s mathematical reasoning with unerring accuracy.
Often, a seemingly minor flaw would cause a paper’s entire theoretical foundation to crumble, turning years of an author’s painstaking research into dust in an instant.
Someone with too much time on their hands had once done an unofficial tally: in the past two years, the total number of papers that had made it to publication in a top journal with Terence Tao as a signed reviewer was a mere three.
And this paper, in the latest issue of JAMS, was the fourth.