Chapter 193 - 145: Such Terror
And so, early yesterday morning, Chen Lin had taken Yaoyao out.
They spent the day following Jinmen’s Line 9, exploring all the attractions along the route.
From the penguins and polar bears at Polar Ocean Park and the tornado-shaped bookshelves of Binhai Library, to the giant whale skeleton in the Ocean Museum...
To top it all off, that evening at the Aircraft Carrier Park, they were lucky enough to catch a brilliant fireworks show.
On the subway ride home, Yaoyao, having had her fill of fun, was like a happy little sparrow, chirping away nonstop the entire trip.
At the peak of her excitement, she even puffed out her little chest, leaned in conspiratorially to Chen Lin’s ear, and offered her services.
"Brother Chen Lin, let me tell you, I’m an amazing wingman! I’ve helped a bunch of boys in my class chase after girls—I gave them all the ideas!"
"So which of the ladies at your company do you have your eye on? Is it Shen Yan or Yunqing? Just tell me, and I guarantee I’ll help you win her over!"
Chen Lin didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He unhesitatingly gave her a light flick on the forehead.
"What does a little kid like you know? Go do your homework!"
𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚
Pulled from his memories, Chen Lin looked at the picture on his computer screen. It was the little girl, her face lit by fireworks, her smile innocent and carefree. He couldn’t help but shake his head and let out a soft sigh.
’Sigh. Kids these days. Who knows what kind of nonsense they’re looking at online all day? They’re so young, yet they seem to know so much.’
’It was nothing like when I was in elementary school. All I knew then was how to run around like a madman and play all over the place.’
The all-in-one printer and copier that Huang Yiyi had bought for the company was a fairly new commercial model. It hadn’t been cheap, and its features were quite powerful.
After adjusting a few settings on his computer, Chen Lin loaded the photo paper into the dedicated tray.
With a soft whirring of machinery, vibrant, glossy photos began to slide slowly from the output tray.
Chen Lin picked one up. In the photo, brilliant fireworks blossomed against the deep night sky, brightly illuminating Yaoyao’s little face, flushed red with excitement. Her eyes were crinkled in an innocent, carefree smile.
"Came out pretty well," Chen Lin muttered, patting himself on the back. He carefully gathered all the printed photos, found an envelope in a drawer, and placed them inside.
Just as he had the first time he’d taken Yaoyao out, Chen Lin promised to bring her the photos during their next tutoring session.
With that taken care of, Chen Lin stretched. He was just about to put on his headphones and dive back into the ocean of code for the large AI model when his phone on the desk suddenly chimed. A notification popped up on the screen.
Chen Lin picked it up. It wasn’t a WeChat message or a text, but a new email notification from his personal Yannan University account.
He tapped open his email.
An unread email sat at the very top of his inbox. The sender’s name made him pause.
’A foreigner sent this?’
The sender field displayed a name: Peter Scholze.
Chen Lin frowned, running the name through his mind and confirming that it didn’t ring any bells.
Instead of opening the email immediately, he opened his browser and pasted the name into the search engine.
The moment the search results appeared, Chen Lin merely glanced at the first few entries and froze.
Peter Schultz.
Mathematician from Hans Country, 2018 Fields Medal laureate, professor at Bonn University, director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics... Hailed as "the most dazzling genius in the global mathematics community of the last two decades."
When Chen Lin’s gaze finally landed on a more detailed biography—"Schultz entered university at 20, earned his Ph.D. at 25, and was appointed a W3 professor at Bonn University that same year, becoming the youngest tenured professor in Hans Country at the time"—he couldn’t help but gasp.
In that moment, he felt he finally understood the meaning behind two words he often saw in web novels.
Utterly terrifying!
Chen Lin’s mind was in turmoil.
’After all, the only reason I could graduate early in my junior year and was about to be appointed as a special professor was because I had the system’s ridiculously overpowered [Little Mathematician] title. I’m basically using a cheat code.’
’But this Peter Schultz... he relied purely on his own mind, reaching a height at the age of 25, step by painstaking step, that countless ordinary people could never hope to achieve in a lifetime!’
’Is this what the pinnacle of human intellect looks like?’
With a complex mix of emotions, Chen Lin went back to his inbox, took a deep breath, and opened the email.
The email was written in Chinese, but it had the unmistakable, lingering awkwardness of a machine translation. Clearly, Schultz had written it in his native German or English and then run it through AI software.
However, that didn’t prevent Chen Lin from understanding its contents.
The email began with Schultz politely expressing his appreciation for Chen Lin’s paper on Differential Geometry and generative models. His words were filled with praise and admiration for the mathematical thinking and techniques it showcased.
He then briefly introduced his own field of research: arithmetic geometry.
Then, the tone shifted abruptly.
The main body of the email was suddenly filled with technical jargon. Schultz dedicated large sections to introducing his primary research focus over the past two years, along with two cutting-edge problems he considered particularly challenging.
Terms like "p-adic geometry," "Perfect Space theory," "the FF Curve," and the "geometric local Langlands Program"...
To an ordinary person, this arcane material would be like a book written in a divine language; it would take immense effort just to understand the titles.
But with the aid of his [Little Mathematician] title, Chen Lin read through it effortlessly. The complex, profound theories and concepts seemed to transform into basic mathematical symbols before his eyes, their internal logic and structure instantly analyzed and laid bare in his mind.
At the end of the email, Schultz once again expressed his hope.
He said he would be attending the World Mathematics Conference in the Imperial Capital at the end of the month. If Chen Lin was interested in the problems mentioned, he suggested he might spend some time looking into them. Schultz expressed that he greatly hoped for an opportunity to have an enjoyable in-person discussion with him at the conference.
PHEW...
Chen Lin finished reading the entire email, let out a long breath, and leaned back in his chair.
His first reaction wasn’t excitement or thrill, but... a slight sense of bewilderment.
’What’s the deal with this big shot?’
’Is he that confident I can make any real progress on such a complex, cutting-edge problem in less than two weeks?’
’This is a problem a Fields Medal laureate is currently tackling himself!’
’If I show up empty-handed without having figured anything out, wouldn’t that be incredibly awkward?’
’Still, I am confident that if I just had enough time, I could definitely produce results!’
At that thought, his second reaction immediately followed. ’There isn’t enough time!’
’I only have a fixed two and a half hours for math research each day, and I have to prioritize preparing my own presentation for the mathematics conference.’
’It’s hard to say how much of the remaining time I can squeeze out to work on Schultz’s two problems.’