Chapter 89 - 86: Riemann’s Manuscript
In the cafeteria of Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School.
Elder Chen had just sat down with his tray, taken a bite of still-steaming twice-cooked pork, and was about to ask Li Dong if he had run into any difficulties with his paper.
"Teacher Chen, I’m done eating."
Li Dong’s voice rang out from across the table.
Elder Chen froze for a moment. The pork was still in his mouth when he saw Li Dong place a USB drive in front of him.
"Teacher Chen, the final version of the paper and all the data are on the USB drive. I’m heading back to the dorm now."
With that, Li Dong stood up and left.
Leaving Elder Chen alone with his bowl, bewildered in the middle of the cafeteria.
"This little brat..." Elder Chen muttered, staring speechlessly at the USB drive on the table.
Other students working on a Qiu Prize project would be meticulously careful, terrified of making any mistakes in their paper.
’But this kid? He just dumps his paper and runs. Don’t you want your big physics prize anymore?’
How could Li Dong possibly have the mind to care about some "scraps from the Hysteresis Loop" right now?
All he wanted was to get back immediately and look at the file Gauss had sent.
Li Dong sprinted all the way back, rushing into the student dorms at Sixth Middle School.
As the top "super middle school" in the entire city, Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School’s students mostly came from families who would rent an apartment next to the school just to support them, brewing nourishing soups and traditional medicines for their children every day.
Because of this, very few students boarded at Sixth Middle School.
So someone like Li Dong, who was "air-dropped" from Seventh Middle School and didn’t have parents accompanying him, was assigned directly to a single dorm room.
BAM!
Li Dong slammed the door shut behind him and even locked it.
He walked over to his desk, sat down, took two deep breaths, then pulled out his phone and opened the private chat with [John Carl Friedrich Gauss] in WeChat.
The file icon lay there quietly.
Li Dong tapped it gently.
There was no loading bar, no flashy special effects, because...
It shot directly into Li Dong’s mind.
"Young one, that student of mine, Bernhard Riemann, once left behind a manuscript on the distribution of prime numbers."
"However, limited by the computational limits of the flesh, he was unable to verify the deeper vistas before his death..."
"And we... were unable to [%&￥#Rules Shielding... Cross-Dimensional Anchor Point Failure...]"
Garbled characters flashed, and Gauss’s voice stopped.
Then, a manuscript unfolded in Li Dong’s mind.
*Fragment of the Calculation of Non-trivial Zero Points of the Riemann Zeta Function — Bernhard Riemann’s Last Words*.
"I am certain that for those non-trivial zeros that make the distribution of primes seem chaotic, all their real parts are 1/2."
"They are arranged neatly on that critical line, like notes in a symphony composed by God."
"I began to search for them using contour integration and the saddle-point method..."
"Contour integration and the saddle-point method?"
Li Dong murmured to himself as he looked at the manuscript.
"Isn’t this the original, complete derivation of the famous Riemann-Siegel formula?"
Siegel had found Riemann’s unpublished drafts in the University of Göttingen library and managed to piece together the core framework of the formula, but he never succeeded in reconstructing Riemann’s complete deductive logic.
And now, this most complete manuscript, containing all of Riemann’s thought processes and unpublished techniques, had appeared right before his eyes.
The text continued...
"Using this asymptotic series formula I derived, I spent several months of my life..."
"I firmly believe my formula is mathematically and logically flawless."
"However, the calculations required to find the zeros are simply too vast."
"As the imaginary part t approaches infinity, the frequency of the oscillating function becomes extremely chaotic, and the computational load increases exponentially!"
"I have reached the limit of what my body can endure."
"COUGH, COUGH... This damned tuberculosis, it continues to steal my breath, and the immense calculations are draining my very life force..."
"In these past few months, I have calculated the positions of the first 1104 non-trivial zeros..."
"I have a faint feeling that in the abyss where the imaginary part t approaches infinity, if even a single zero appears that is not on the critical line with a real part of 1/2, my optimal estimate for the pattern of prime distribution will completely fail, and humanity’s understanding of primes will recede back into the fog."
"A human lifespan is too short. I cannot exhaust the infinite."
"Therefore, this is as far as I can go..."
Li Dong sat frozen in his chair, his breathing becoming labored.
"The... the first 1104?"
He clearly remembered that in this timeline, the history books of the real world said something completely different!
He opened his browser and quickly typed in a few keywords.
A moment later, relevant historical research materials appeared on the webpage...
[According to later mathematicians who examined Riemann’s surviving drafts, limited by the extremely large volume of calculations, Riemann only managed to manually calculate the approximate values of the first 3 non-trivial zeros during his lifetime.]
Li Dong stared intently at the screen.
"The history books clearly say there were only 3! But this final manuscript from a parallel universe actually derived up to the 1104th?"
"Wait..."
Li Dong suddenly froze. He felt like he had seen the number 1104 somewhere before.
With slightly trembling fingers, he typed a new search query into the keyboard.
He pressed enter.
An entry on the history of computer science popped up.
[In 1953, the father of computer science, Alan Turing, in his search for a counterexample to the Riemann Hypothesis, used the world’s most advanced electronic computer at the time for verification. The machine ran at full power for a long time, and the final number of non-trivial zeros calculated was: 1104.]
Li Dong looked at this information, then thought back to the final number in the Riemann’s Manuscript in his mind.
1104!
Exactly the same!
Li Dong’s scalp tingled as a horrifying shiver instantly ran down his entire body.
That parallel universe’s Riemann, in the mid-19th century, with just a pen and a stack of scratch paper...
...in the last few months of his life, while suffering from terminal tuberculosis, had used his mortal body and a god-tier algorithm to leap across nearly a century of time and match the computational power of the father of computing, Turing’s, early vacuum tube computer?
’No wonder the final manuscript said the immense calculations were draining his life force!’
’He was using a carbon-based body to forcibly bear silicon-based computational power!’
’He was basically a human computer!’
Just as Li Dong was having an existential crisis, shaken by the dimension-spanning, terrifying computational power of this mathematical titan...
BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ
The phone, which had been tossed on the desk, suddenly started vibrating.
Li Dong glanced down.
It was the group chat for the "Cyan Dragon Study Group"!
He opened the group chat interface, where a flood of system notifications had already spammed the screen.
[Warning: Received underlying mathematical computational power that exceeds the current dimension’s carrying capacity!]
[Logic barrier under impact...]
[%&*#Rule firewall attempting repair...]
[Unknown anchor point detected. Establishing cross-spacetime data buffer...]
Garbled text scrolled wildly.
And at the very bottom, a red packet lay there quietly.
[Bernhard Riemann has sent a private red packet]
Li Dong stared at the name.
He clearly remembered that Riemann wasn’t even in the group!
But now, the red packet was right in front of him.
Before, every time he saw a big shot send a red packet in the group, Li Dong would be ecstatic. After all, freeloading was awesome.
This time, however, Li Dong only felt pressure.
’I don’t know what consequences will come from accepting this red packet...’
’...but I’m the Group Leader. If I don’t even have the guts to accept a red packet from a group member...’
Li Dong smiled, feeling a sense of relief at that moment.
"...then that would be just pathetic."
[You have claimed Bernhard Riemann’s private red packet]
[Reward obtained: All basic core attributes +0.1 (Permanent)]
At that moment, Li Dong felt his mind become incredibly clear!
But the system notifications weren’t over yet.
[Group Announcement: Drastic technological deviation has occurred in an unknown parallel universe (spacetime coordinates unresolvable)...]
[Because of your observation and data reception, you have become an external buffer storage for Riemann’s immense computational power before his death.]
[In this unknown universe, Bernhard Riemann’s brain was saved from collapsing due to computational overload, and the fatal drain on his life force has ceased.]
[He survived...]
Li Dong stared at the notification, completely stunned.
’I shouldered the burden for the Riemann in another parallel universe?’
’So that mathematical genius who fell at the age of 39... survived?’
Li Dong swallowed hard.
And just then, a new notification popped up in the group chat interface:
[Bernhard Riemann has joined the Cyan Dragon Study Group.]