Chapter 145 - 143: Claude E. S What?
Excited as Li Dong was, he hadn’t forgotten something else.
’After all, there were two pending applications to join the group.’
He quickly returned to the main screen and tapped on the application list again.
Now that he was officially the Group Leader, the two applications had changed, though not by much.
The second application was still a string of garbled characters—"%￥#@*&"—completely illegible.
But the first application now faintly revealed a small portion of a prefix from an English name.
[Claude E. S***]
Li Dong stared at the partially obscured English letters, his brow furrowed.
"Claude E. S... what?"
"Claude E. Spencer?..."
Li Dong quickly wracked his brain for famous figures in scientific history named Claude, but since the most crucial part of the surname was hidden, he couldn’t immediately identify the person.
"This stupid group loves to pull these kinds of stunts."
Li Dong grumbled in annoyance, but still tried tapping the [Agree] button next to the name.
Unsurprisingly.
Nothing happened, no matter how many times he tapped.
’Sigh, I guess my authority still isn’t quite enough.’
Still, Li Dong wasn’t too disappointed.
’You have to be content with what you have,’ he mused. ’Unlocking the data transfer function was already an epic-level upgrade.’
With this, he could finally achieve true two-way communication with the scientific titans from across history in the group. The value of that was simply unimaginable.
"Time for bed!"
Satisfied, Li Dong tossed his phone onto the pillow beside him and fell right to sleep.
...
The days flew by, and in the blink of an eye, it was January 7th.
Only one day remained until the official opening of the ICCM.
Early that morning, Li Dong boarded the high-speed train from Kyoto to Shanghai.
Bored during the ride, Li Dong started scrolling on his phone.
He casually opened the list of trending topics to see if there was any big news and was immediately amused by one of the top ten entries.
#PrincetonProfessorSlamsInfluencerForTakingWordsOutOfContext#
When he tapped on it, Li Dong almost burst out laughing.
It turned out that the science communication bloggers, Old Yao and Xiaowei—the ones who had been stirring up drama on overseas platforms and making snide remarks about Li Dong’s algorithm a few days ago—had crashed and burned!
They had never imagined that their attempt to cater to certain overseas audiences—by quoting Professor Arthur Penrose of Princeton University out of context—would actually get back to Professor Penrose himself!
After one of his Huaxia exchange students translated the video for him, Arthur Penrose got so angry he smashed a cup in his office.
The Cup: ???
He immediately had the student help him register a social media account and recorded a video himself.
In the video, Professor Penrose’s face was flushed as he spoke in English, with Chinese subtitles provided:
"Who is twisting my words? This dimensionality reduction algorithm is the greatest breakthrough in Computational Mathematics of the century!"
"It doesn’t just restructure the fundamental logic for calculating the zeros of the Riemann ζ-function; it holds immeasurable value for future high-dimensional matrix operations, primality testing algorithms, and even security assessments in cryptography!"
"Do the people calling it meaningless have brains full of mush? These two bloggers are insulting the very rigor of science!"
A professor personally stepping in to tear down pseudo-science bloggers was a bit like bringing a nuke to a knife fight.
Ordinary bloggers wouldn’t have been scared, since they don’t operate in the same circles.
But Old Yao and Xiaowei had always branded themselves as science communicators. Their target audience was the scientifically literate community.
So, Old Yao and Xiaowei scrambled to delete all the related videos overnight and posted an apology.
"We are sorry. Our English proficiency is limited, and we failed to accurately understand Professor Penrose’s original meaning, which misled everyone..."
However, as Li Dong watched this farce unfold and scrolled down to the comments, he couldn’t help but sigh.
The matter, it seemed, didn’t end with their apology.
In the world of the internet, there’s never a shortage of self-righteous "geniuses."
In fact, because Old Yao and Xiaowei had caved and apologized so quickly, they only fueled conspiracy theories among some netizens.
[Old Yao, were you threatened by corporate interests? If so, blink twice!]
[I knew it! That contract manufacturer’s backers are definitely powerful. They even managed to bribe a Princeton professor to do damage control. This goes way deeper than we thought!]
[Heh, so what if this algorithm is so amazing? Is it going to raise our paychecks by a single penny? Can it produce a single grain of rice? It’s just some academic game, completely detached from the common person and with no real-world application. I still think it’s completely meaningless!]
Li Dong was left speechless as he read these brain-dead comments.
He wasn’t angry, so much as baffled. ’How can people be this stupid?’
Of course, Li Dong knew these people didn’t care about non-trivial zeros. They didn’t even have a concept of what they were.
They only wanted to believe the "conspiracy theories" they had cooked up in their own heads.
’Whatever, I’m done looking at this.’
Li Dong closed his eyes to rest his mind.
The online discourse was a chaotic circus, but in the true world of academia, the tsunami set off by his algorithm was only just beginning to form.
The paper Li Dong had dropped on arXiv, which announced the first 10^23 non-trivial zeros of the Riemann ζ-function, had driven the world’s mathematicians into a frenzy!
This sample data had been reverse-verified by several of the world’s top Supercomputing Centers and was found to be utterly flawless!
Every single sampled zero fell strictly on the critical line, perfectly satisfying the core condition of ζ(s) = 0!
This time, the international heavyweights who had previously harbored doubts about Li Dong could no longer sit still.
The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICCM) was, as its full Chinese name—the World Congress of Chinese Mathematicians—implied, an event primarily for Chinese mathematicians from across the globe. Although some top foreign scholars were always invited as guests, the event’s scope had always remained within a relatively fixed circle.
But this year, the situation had spiraled completely out of control!
A massive number of top-tier foreign mathematics experts, computational number theory titans, and even computer scientists specializing in high-performance algorithms—none of whom were on the original invitation list—were suddenly registering to attend.
Professor Peter Sarnak from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study canceled a planned lecture in Europe and bought the first available flight to Shanghai.
Professor Zhang Yitang, the renowned Chinese-American mathematician from Princeton University, and Professor Tao Zhexuan, the Fields Medal-winning prodigy from the University of California, Los Angeles, also confirmed their attendance well in advance.
Even the legendary Enrico Bombieri from the Institute for Advanced Study—a living legend who had won the Fields Medal decades ago for his work on the prime number theorem—had his assistant email the ICCM organizing committee.
They all had a single objective: the 45-minute special lecture to be delivered on the afternoon of the second day of the conference by a Yan University undergraduate named Li Dong!
This year’s ICCM, both in terms of attendance and the prestige of its international academic standing, had reached unprecedented heights.
...
At two in the afternoon, the high-speed train pulled smoothly into Shanghai’s Hongqiao Station.
Li Dong hailed a cab and headed straight for the East Suburb Hotel in the Pudong New Area.
This was the designated hotel for attendees of the ICCM.
Li Dong had come alone.
He had originally thought Liu Ruochuan would be coming with him.
But as it turned out, Old Liu had already rushed off to Shanghai a couple of days earlier.
It couldn’t be helped. The scale of the conference had suddenly exploded, flooded with top international heavyweights.
As the Dean of the Yan University School of Mathematics, Liu Ruochuan was also the core vice-chairman of the ICCM organizing committee and a member of its academic board. To top it off, his own paper on p-adic Hodge theory was one of the conference’s key presentations.
Old Liu was simply too busy to look after Li Dong. He had just sent him the digital invitation via WeChat and told him to check in on his own.
Li Dong walked up to the check-in counter.
"Hello, I’m here to check in. Here’s my digital invitation."
Li Dong handed over his phone.
The young woman volunteering at the reception desk glanced at the name on the invitation: [Invited Speaker: Li Dong (Yanjing University)].
She froze for a second, her eyes widening in surprise as she looked up at Li Dong’s impossibly young face.
Her professionalism, however, kept her from asking any questions, and she quickly prepared his key card.
"Mr. Li Dong, your room is an executive suite in the South Wing. The elevator is straight ahead."
"Thank you."
Li Dong wheeled his suitcase to his suite.
The room was spacious and elegantly furnished. Opening the window revealed a view of the hotel’s gardens and lake.
’Ahh, it’s nice and peaceful being alone.’
Li Dong was about to take a shower and then review the PowerPoint for his presentation tomorrow.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.
A sudden knock came at the door.
’Huh? Didn’t Old Liu say he was busy today?’ Li Dong wondered.
Puzzled, Li Dong opened the door.
Standing outside was a tall, beautiful foreign woman with blonde hair and blue eyes.