Chapter 212 - 160: An Early Start
At eight o’clock the next morning.
While eating breakfast at the hotel restaurant, Chen Lin said to Shen Yan, who was sitting across from him, "I’ll need to spend some time to finalize my PowerPoint for this afternoon’s presentation. The first lecture starts at 8:30, so if there’s one you want to hear, you might have to head over on your own."
Sipping her milk, Shen Yan merely shook her head. Her tone was as calm as always, but there was a hint of tenderness in her eyes as she looked at Chen Lin.
"I’ll wait for you."
So, after finishing breakfast, Chen Lin returned to his room and worked on his laptop for over half an hour.
He concisely added the latest developments from his research over the past two nights to the final few slides of his PowerPoint. Then, he went over the entire presentation’s logical structure one more time. Only after confirming it was foolproof did he carefully place his laptop and the thick stack of draft paper into his backpack.
At nine o’clock sharp, he met up with Shen Yan, who was waiting in the first-floor lobby.
Without delay, they first accompanied Shen Yan to the neighboring Huaqing University, where she attended a lecture she was interested in at one of the parallel session venues.
At 10:45, they hurried back to the main venue at Yanbei University to catch the last lecture session of the morning.
Director Feng Yunhai had personally recommended this lecture to Chen Lin and Shen Yan two days prior. The speaker was a venerable and highly respected professor from Yanbei University.
The lecture’s topic was "On the Zero Density Estimate of the Riemann Zeta Function."
Even within the field of pure mathematics, this topic was considered the pinnacle of the Ivory Tower. Its profound and abstract nature was enough to deter ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all math majors.
For that very reason, when Chen Lin and Shen Yan entered the lecture hall, they found the audience was even sparser than it had been for Schultz’s talk the previous day.
In a lecture hall that could accommodate nearly a thousand people, fewer than two hundred were scattered sparsely among the seats, making the space feel rather empty.
However, the elderly professor’s expertise was truly on another level.
The many novel viewpoints he presented, along with the groundbreaking mathematical methods he employed, left both Chen Lin and Shen Yan completely engrossed. Shen Yan, in particular, filled several pages with notes as she listened.
Anxious about his afternoon presentation, neither of them was in the mood to go off-campus for lunch. Instead, they just had a quick bite at the buffet Yanbei University provided for attendees.
During the lunch break, Chen Lin took Shen Yan back to the quiet lounge from the morning.
He planned to use this last bit of time to mentally rehearse his afternoon presentation one last time.
A few young attendees from Chinese universities were already in the lounge. Their faces lit up with excitement when they saw Chen Lin, and they looked like they wanted to come over and chat with him.
But when they saw Chen Lin sit down, immediately pull a thick stack of manuscripts from his backpack, and lose himself in the pages with intense focus, the young attendees exchanged a glance and silently dropped the idea.
The minutes ticked by.
At 1:05 PM, just as Chen Lin finished his final mental rehearsal, feeling that his entire chain of logic had formed a perfect, closed loop, a young woman in a volunteer vest quietly entered the room.
She first had Chen Lin sign a check-in form to confirm that he, the speaker for the next session, was present. Then, she quietly reminded him, "Teacher Chen, according to conference regulations, the first speaker of the afternoon can choose to start ten minutes early, at 1:20."
’Teacher...’ The corner of Chen Lin’s mouth twitched when he heard the title.
But when he heard the rest of what the volunteer said, Chen Lin’s eyes lit up.
’This is perfect!’
He had estimated that it would take about forty minutes to present all of his current material.
If he stuck to the scheduled forty-five minutes, that would only leave five minutes for audience Q&A, which was definitely cutting it close.
’After all, just who were these titans sitting in the audience and watching online?’
’Just among the ones I know, there’s Qiu Chengtong, Schultz, Academician Liang, and those two I’ve only ever heard of but never seen in person—Faltings and Deligne.’
’If the titans get into it and each of them asks just one question, how could five minutes possibly be enough?’
’An extra ten minutes would give me much more breathing room.’
"Okay, no problem. I can start early," Chen Lin agreed with a nod.
"That’s great," the volunteer said with a sweet smile. "Could you please come with me to the lecture hall to get ready? We need about five minutes to help you with the equipment setup."
Chen Lin and Shen Yan followed the volunteer, returning once again to the main lecture hall.
Knowing the layout, Shen Yan found herself a seat with a good view in the middle section, while Chen Lin walked directly up to the stage.
The equipment setup went smoothly. Chen Lin glanced at the time in the bottom right corner of his computer: 1:18 PM.
He raised his head, his gaze sweeping across the audience. Even though he had been prepared for it, he couldn’t help but marvel to himself.
’Wow, what a turnout.’
The main lecture hall, capable of holding nearly a thousand, was already packed to the gills. Not only that, but the side aisles and the open space at the very back were also crammed with people. A sea of dark heads, a rough estimate put the crowd at twelve hundred people at least.
Chen Lin’s eyes immediately fell on Academician Liang Tianshi, Director Feng Yunhai, and Professor Gongtan, who were seated in the first three rows. They were chatting in low voices, smiles of anticipation on their faces.
Not far away, Schultz, Annie, and Annie’s advisor, Professor Moitra, were also sitting side by side.
Schultz was watching him with a serious expression and gave him an encouraging thumbs-up.
On the enormous screens flanking the stage, the list of online attendees was already a long, scrolling feed. Chen Lin gave it a cursory glance but didn’t bother trying to spot the names of Faltings and Deligne.
Even though this was the first time in his life he’d ever given a presentation at such a major, formal, public event, Chen Lin felt surprisingly calm. He didn’t feel a shred of nervousness or stage fright.
’Are you kidding me? If I got nervous over something like this, I’d be unworthy of the title [Little Mathematician].’
He walked to the lectern, adjusted the microphone’s height, cleared his throat, and gave a slight nod to the audience. Then, he opened his prepared PowerPoint presentation.
Unlike the polished, intricate presentations typical of most academic reports, Chen Lin’s PowerPoint was brutally simple.
No flashy templates, no elaborate animations. Each slide was simply a high-definition scan of his own handwritten notes, densely packed with the most critical proofs and calculation steps.
"Good afternoon, professors and students."
Chen Lin’s voice carried clearly through the sound system to every corner of the hall.
"The topic of my presentation today is ’Boundaries of Manifolds in Differential Geometry and the Control of Hallucinations in Generative Models’."
He wasted no time, spending the first five minutes giving a highly condensed summary of the core ideas from his paper already published in JAMS.
Then, he immediately shifted gears and cut to the chase.
"Building on the work from that paper, I have recently conducted some more in-depth research..."