Chapter 174 - 169: Teacher Yang, Let’s Do Research Together
Li Dong carefully reviewed the paper Sun Xiang had written.
To be honest, the quality of the paper was much better than he had expected.
The experimental logic was sound, the data was presented clearly, and the causal reasoning in the Discussion section had no major flaws.
The description of the restoration of sexual reproduction after the HpPAR gene knockout was especially refined and precise—not at all like something a former high school biology teacher could write.
’Is the Passive Skill, Inheritance of the Torch, really this powerful?’
Li Dong made a mental note.
Then, he nodded and said.
"Teacher Sun, I don’t see any problems with it."
Sun Xiang was also very satisfied with his revisions to the paper, and he was positively glowing.
He was just about to open his mouth to say something when he heard Li Dong add another sentence.
"Oh, right. I already sent the paper to Professor Zhang a moment ago."
Sun Xiang: "???"
He froze on the spot.
’What do you mean, "a moment ago"?’
’What do you mean, "already sent"?’
’Then what about the last two hours I spent here, painstakingly revising the causal logic in the Discussion section word by word, adjusting the format of the references, and even mulling over the difference between a comma and a semicolon a dozen times...’
’What was all that for?’
’Was I just putting on a performance for you? The self-congratulatory toil of an academic peon?’
Sun Xiang opened his mouth, but not a single word came out.
Actually, Li Dong wasn’t trying to mess with Sun Xiang on purpose.
The version of the paper he sent to Professor Zhang was the same one he had just sent to Mendel.
He’d already gotten the red envelope from the group chat.
This proved there was nothing wrong with the paper.
As for why he let Sun Xiang continue to revise it, the reason was simple.
When the Passive Skill, Inheritance of the Torch, was active, all of Sun Xiang’s stats would be boosted.
Having him go through the paper from start to finish was like having him re-digest the entire experimental logic while in a "cheat mode."
This would be a huge benefit for him when he undertakes independent projects in the future.
As for the curses Sun Xiang was probably screaming in his head...
Li Dong pretended he couldn’t hear them.
...
Yan University.
In Professor Tian Gang’s office, on the fifth floor of Science Building One.
Tian Gang sat at his desk, holding the latest issue of the *Annals of Mathematics*.
He had been reading it all morning.
From the editorial statement on the first page to the last formula in the main text, he had gone through it three times from front to back.
"A Complete Proof of Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association for the Interval |α|∈[0, 4]"
Author: Li Dong.
Tian Gang took off his reading glasses and glanced at the desk calendar.
From submission to official publication, a grand total of seventeen days.
Tian Gang leaned back in his chair and let out a deep, meaningful sigh.
"Incredible."
"Seventeen days... he broke Old Zhang’s record."
Tian Gang smiled as he continued to flip through the paper.
"At this rate, it’s not just about the Salem Prize anymore..."
"I’m afraid the Fields Medal Committee of the International Mathematical Union has already taken notice of him."
The Fields Medal is awarded every four years. The next ceremony would be in 2026, announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia.
Recipients must be under forty years of age on January 1st of the award year, and the decision is made by a secret ballot of the Fields Medal Committee, which is selected by the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union.
The nominations are confidential; candidates aren’t even notified that they’ve been added to the pool.
But having been in this circle for decades, Tian Gang had a certain feel for the selection dynamics.
Li Dong was nineteen this year.
He had pushed the old boundary of Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association from |α|
The weight of this achievement was significant enough to earn a spot in the entire history of analytic number theory.
’The only one who could probably compete with him would be...’
Tian Gang thought of Maxim Raziwill.
Born in 1988, the Canadian mathematician was currently a full professor at the University of Chicago and widely recognized as one of the most dazzling new stars in the field of analytic number theory.
Raziwill had made a series of breakthrough contributions regarding moment estimates of multiplicative functions, subconvexity bounds for automorphic L-functions, and the fine structure of prime number distribution.
He received the Ramanujan Prize in 2020 and the New Horizons Mathematics Prize last year.
In the mathematical community’s view, he had already locked in a Fields Medal.
But now...
A nineteen-year-old from Huaxia had appeared out of nowhere.
Tian Gang sighed with emotion.
’He’s probably going to fulfill the dream I never could.’
Professor Tian Gang was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an international authority in the fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis.
His work on Ricci flow and Kähler geometry was world-class.
But he himself had once been a candidate for the Fields Medal.
In 1998, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin, Tian Gang had made it into the final pool of candidates.
That year’s Fields Medal was ultimately awarded to four mathematicians: Borcherds, Görs, Kontsevich, and McMullen.
Tian Gang was not selected.
After that, he crossed the forty-year-old threshold and was no longer eligible.
It became the sole regret of his academic career.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t brilliant enough; the competition that year was simply too fierce.
Now, a nineteen-year-old youth from Huaxia’s mainland had the chance to stand on the podium he had never reached.
Tian Gang sincerely hoped Li Dong could make it that far.
But then, he frowned.
’Xiaoliu taking him as a student... doesn’t feel quite right anymore.’
Tian Gang muttered.
Liu Ruochuan had been his master’s student.
He had personally nurtured Liu Ruochuan from a green young man into the current Dean of Yan University’s School of Mathematics.
In terms of academic lineage, Liu Ruochuan was his student, and Li Dong was Liu Ruochuan’s student.
That made Li Dong his academic grandson.
’Making him his junior brother sounds about right.’
Liu Ruochuan: ???
Just as Tian Gang was mulling this over, the landline on his desk suddenly rang.
He picked up the receiver and looked at the caller ID.
Huaxia Society, Domestic Division.
Tian Gang answered the call.
"Academician Tian, hello. Sorry to bother you."
"I’m Zhou Mingyuan, a reporter from the science and technology desk of the Huaxia Society’s Domestic Division."
"There’s something I’d like to ask you about, if you have a moment?"
Tian Gang said with a smile.
"I’m free now. Go ahead."
The person on the other end asked.
"It’s like this, Academician Tian."
"We noticed that the latest issue of the *Annals of Mathematics* published a paper from Yan University, and the author is an undergraduate named Li Dong."
"The paper’s content involves a major breakthrough on Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association, and the time from submission to publication was extremely short."
"We’d like to run a story on it, but before we do, we wanted to verify the academic merit and authenticity of this achievement with you."
Tian Gang smiled. He knew what the person on the other end was worried about.
The Han Chunyu incident of 2016 remains a scar on the Huaxia academic community to this day.
At the time, an associate professor at Hebei University of Science and Technology claimed to have made a "Nobel-level" breakthrough in the field of gene editing, with the paper published in *Nature Biotechnology*.
As soon as the news broke, before it was fully verified by third-party experts, numerous domestic media outlets reported on it extensively, putting him on a pedestal.
The result? In less than half a year, more than twenty labs from both home and abroad jointly published papers stating they could not replicate the experimental results.
The paper was ultimately retracted, and the international reputation of the entire Huaxia academic community was tarnished.
The current situation was even more unusual than that one.
A freshman publishing in one of the top four journals, and what he published was the most significant theoretical breakthrough in analytic number theory in half a century.
If they were to report this without verification and it turned out to be another disaster...
As Huaxia’s most authoritative official news agency, the Huaxia Society could only afford to slip up on academic reporting once.
No one could bear the responsibility for a second time.
That’s why they called Tian Gang directly.
Tian Gang listened to the reporter’s questions.
"Xiaozhou, you’re right to be cautious."
"But in this matter, you can rest assured."
"Li Dong’s paper passed the most rigorous peer review by the editorial board of the *Annals of Mathematics*."
"The reviewers included Fields Medalist Tao Zhexuan, as well as Nicholas Katz, a core member of the *Annals* editorial board."
"Furthermore, before the paper was published, professors from Yan University, Shuimu, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Mathematics Institute, Fudan University, and Zhejiang University who work in related fields already conducted a round of collective seminars. They unanimously agreed that the paper’s mathematical logic is completely self-consistent and the results are genuine and credible."
Tian Gang paused, then added.
"And I can tell you, with great responsibility, that the significance of this achievement is even greater than you imagine."
The other end of the line was silent for two seconds.
"I understand now, Academician Tian. Thank you very much for your confirmation. Sorry for the trouble."
"You’re welcome."
The person on the other end politely hung up.
Tian Gang put down the receiver, leaned back in his chair, and stared blankly at the ceiling for a while.
Then he picked up his cell phone and called Liu Ruochuan.
RING... RING...
The call connected quickly.
"Teacher."
Liu Ruochuan said on the other end of the line.
Tian Gang grunted in acknowledgment.
"Is Li Dong back yet?"
Liu Ruochuan said.
"Not yet, but it should be in the next day or two."
"Well, when he gets back, let me know. I want to see him."
"Okay, Teacher."
Then, Liu Ruochuan hesitated.
"Um, Teacher, there’s something... Old Jiang... he wants to see Li Dong, too."
Tian Gang frowned.
He understood why Liu Ruochuan was telling him this.
Liu Ruochuan didn’t want Li Dong to get involved with Jiang Yubai, but he was a generation younger than Jiang Yubai and, in terms of seniority, found it difficult to refuse him directly.
But as for Tian Gang...
’Are you kidding me?’
’When it comes to factions in the Huaxia Mathematical Community, not even Qiu Chengtong can pull that stuff.’
"Alright, I understand. I’ll handle this."
After hanging up, Tian Gang muttered Jiang Yubai’s name.
Then he thought about Jiang Yubai’s research area: the local-global compatibility of GL₂ automorphic representations.
Then he recalled the technique used in Li Dong’s paper to handle the pair correlation function of zeros in the |α|>1 interval.
That technique of using the contribution of prime powers for layer-by-layer separation, then using a Fourier optimization framework to control the remainder term... if that could be transferred to the automorphic L-function framework of the Langlands Program...
’Is this Professor Jiang afraid that Li Dong’s future research direction will crash into his?’
’Or does he want to pull him into his own research project?’
Tian Gang thought for a moment, then shook his head again.
’I doubt the kid has the energy for that. Professor Jiang is probably overthinking it.’
Li Dong’s dimensionality reduction algorithm was still undergoing iterative optimization for Huaxuan Technology, and the biology paper for Zhejiang University was just being wrapped up...
A nineteen-year-old, no matter how much of a genius, only has one brain.
He can’t possibly have that much energy.
...
At that moment, the "low on energy" Li Dong had just finished a chat with Riemann in the group.
The topic of their conversation was the same direction Riemann had mentioned before...
The equivalent connection between the pair correlation property of zeros and the local structure of automorphic functions.
Riemann remained a man of few words.
In their entire conversation, Riemann only sent two messages, with a combined length of no more than twenty words.
However, every single word was crucial.
"Pair correlation of zeros... automorphic representation... GL(n)..."
Generalizing from GL₂ to GL(n).
From the specific to the general.
And the starting point of this path happened to be the paper Jiang Yubai had "published" in the *Duke Mathematical Journal*.
’The starting point? Did you really draw that starting line?’
Thinking of this, Li Dong took out his phone and dialed a number.
RING... RING...
The call connected.
"Hello? Li Dong?"
"Teacher Yang, how about we do some research together?"