A genius? I just love studying.

Chapter 141 School starts

Monday, September 8th

After being empty for two months, Rongcheng No. 2 Middle School was once again packed with people; the day of the new school term had finally arrived.

Many new faces, still carrying a youthful air, walked into the school full of curiosity. They had heard many rumors about that senior during the summer vacation and wondered if they would be able to meet the legendary senior at the school.

But most of the students were dejected and felt hopeless.

The senior students in the first semester of their senior year have already been exhausted after two months of summer tutoring, while the junior students have not yet recovered from the joy of summer vacation. The pain of suddenly returning to school is no less than that of weaning.

Although Li Hairen had entered the school, he was still thinking about how to get past the Void Hydra.

Congratulations to Chen Hui from our school for winning first place in the National Mathematics Competition for Secondary School Students (CMO)!
Whether they are curious freshmen, suffering sophomores, or despondent seniors, the first thing they see when they arrive at school is the three banners at the school gate.

"Wow! The school gate has become Chen Hui's memorial arch!"

Li Hai clicked his tongue in amazement. Of course he knew that Chen Hui had won the CMO gold medal. His classmates had discussed it enthusiastically in the class group. Chen Hui even brought him Peking duck when he came back from Beijing.

I must say, Peking duck in Beijing is really good.

Looking back now, it seems like it happened a long time ago.

It had only been less than two months, but he felt as if the world had changed drastically.

Perhaps, Chen Hui is drifting further and further away from them?

Soon, we arrived at the familiar classroom, but the class nameplate hanging outside the classroom had been changed to Class 7, Grade 11.

After settling into his seat, Li Hai felt uneasy for some reason.

Looking around the classroom, he realized that Chen Hui was not there.

How could that "King of Rolls" be late?

In a moment of confusion, Li Hai suddenly remembered that the guy had gone to participate in the IMO.

I've also heard that he has signed a contract with Jiangcheng University, and after the IMO, he most likely won't come back to continue his studies, but will instead go to Jiangcheng University to start his freshman year.

Until this moment, that feeling of emptiness struck my heart, and finally, there was no escaping it.

"Old Liang..."

He subconsciously looked at Liang Peixuan in front of him.

But then he saw Liang Peixuan doing practice problems, just like Chen Hui did back then.

Many students in Class 7 also noticed the empty seat in the classroom.

They had heard many rumors about Chen Hui during the summer vacation, but when it actually happened, they were still somewhat dazed, as if their classmate, who had always lived beside them, had suddenly stepped from reality into legend and would never come back.

An Chengzhang walked into the classroom carrying his textbooks, glancing at the empty seat as well. He quickly composed himself, saying, "I've told you all before that time flies when you're in high school. Before you know it, you're in your second year, and before you know it, you're in your third year..."

……

Paris, France, Charles de Gaulle Airport
Chen Hui got off the plane with a pale face. This was the first time he had spent so long in the air. The flight from Jiangcheng to Paris took a full eleven and a half hours.

Whether it was due to a decline in his athletic proficiency or a recurrence of his old problem, the motion sickness medication failed to save him this time.

Fortunately, he was only slightly dizzy and did not vomit.

"Boss, are you okay?"

Li Zehan reached out and took Chen Hui's suitcase, and Chen Ling'er quickly handed him a bottle of water.

Team leader Xu Zhiyuan rubbed his nose, thinking, "Fine, this has nothing to do with me as the team leader."

"Oh my, you look so pale. Are you scared like this before the competition has even started?"

A piercing sound came from the side, and Chen Hui and the others couldn't ignore it even if they wanted to.

It's true what they say, enemies are destined to meet. The ones who were just talking were the Olympiad team from Xiao Rizi. In such a big airport, it just so happened that the two teams ran into each other.

The person who made the sarcastic remarks spoke Chinese fluently and clearly. Although his appearance and behavior seemed like those of a commoner, it was certain that he was Chinese.

"Tsk tsk tsk, a powerhouse in the Olympiad, but they didn't even get first place in the team competition last year, did they?"

The other contestants remained silent, but he was the one who mocked them very enthusiastically.

"Who's so inconsiderate? Walking their dog without a leash?"

Li Zehan looked around and said loudly, as if he were really looking for the dog's owner.

"you……"

In the matter of arguing, that person was clearly far inferior to Li Zehan.

"With my older brother here, we're definitely going to win first place in the team competition this year. Even Jesus couldn't stop us, I'm telling you!"

Li Zehan looked at that little brat with an arrogant air, dragged Chen Hui's luggage, and charged towards him, saying, "Excuse me, a good dog doesn't block the way!"

That little girl was furious and even stumbled when Li Zehan bumped into her.

His small frame was no match for the chubby Li Zehan.

"What's the use of winning so many gold medals if you don't even have a Fields Medal? You're not even as well off as us. This place is vast and rich in resources, but I don't really see that. It's not as good as our tiny little place."

He couldn't swallow this insult, and that little guy spoke up again.

"That's enough, Gao Zhenjun."

The team leader scolded them.

Just moments ago, Xiao Rizi was furious, but now he retreated back into the group like a dog with its tail between its legs, not daring to say another word.

However, Li Zehan was not going to let him off the hook. "Tsk tsk, the dog may not know any better, but its owner does!"

He's a master at taking advantage of someone's illness to kill them.

Seeing that the day was once again in high demand, Li Zehan had already dragged his luggage a long way away.

Xu Zhiyuan found it somewhat amusing, and even the chubby boy seemed more pleasing to the eye now.

"That little guy is named Gao Zhen. He was criticized by his teacher in junior high school and started to argue with the teacher and not study properly. Eventually, he went to Japan with his family. Unexpectedly, his mathematical talent was discovered. He started participating in math competitions in his third year of junior high school. Last year, in his first year of high school, he won a gold medal at the IMO."

"Then he started clamoring that China's education system was inadequate and that it was China's education system that buried him. Sure enough, as soon as he arrived in Japan, he displayed his mathematical talent and won an IMO gold medal."

Although he was only the temporary team leader this year and was quite busy with scientific research, Xu Zhiyuan still did his homework and began to introduce himself to everyone. "The young people in Xiaozhaizi these past few years have been very good. They are also a dark horse that has emerged unexpectedly. Last year, they won six gold medals, which was slightly better than ours, and they won first place in the team competition."

"This is really weird!"

Xu Zhiyuan was also somewhat puzzled.

How can such a small island nation produce three Fields Medal winners, while China, a great nation, has not produced a single one?

Perhaps it is precisely because of these thoughts that his teaching methods during the training camp are very different from those of other teachers.

This little incident did not affect everyone's mood. When you have absolute strength, that kind of confidence cannot be easily shaken by a few words.

Chen Hui is their greatest source of confidence!

Upon arriving at the taxi waiting area, Xu Zhiyuan skillfully led the group forward for about 100 meters, then took out his phone, entered Bolt, and within a minute, a minivan pulled up in front of them. As a professor at Jiangcheng University, Xu Zhiyuan had attended many conferences in France, which was one of the reasons he was chosen as the team leader.

There was no taxi-like scene, but the driver drove surprisingly steadily, and after about an hour, the group got off at the entrance of Paris-Saclay University.

Xu Zhiyuan took out 48 euros in cash and handed it to the driver before getting out of the car.

"Does France not have Alipay?"

Li Zehan, being the curious child he is, stepped forward and asked.

"There is definitely no Alipay, but there are similar payment apps, but their security is incomparable and they are very easy to be stolen."

Xu Zhiyuan spoke eloquently, but from the pained expression on his face, one could tell that this was probably a lesson learned in blood.

Soon, Xu Zhiyuan successfully made contact with the IMO competition committee and arranged accommodation for Chen Hui and his group. Of course, it wouldn't be inside Saclay University, but rather a youth hostel near the school.

Western competitions are clearly very different from domestic CMO and high school leagues, and the same is true for university competitions.

The official IMO exam is the day after tomorrow. They arrived two days early, naturally to adjust their condition and be in the best possible state for the upcoming IMO competition. Paris and Jiangcheng have a time difference of more than 7 hours, so ordinary people will naturally need time to adapt when they go for the first time.

……

University of Bonn, Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

At ten o'clock in the morning, Hoffmann strolled leisurely in the courtyard, taking half an hour before walking into his office, the editor-in-chief's office of the Journal für die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik (Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics).

While he was lying down, he asked his assistant to bring him a cup of coffee. He sipped the coffee and opened his email. He was just lying down, not refusing to work.

Back in the day, he was a prominent figure in the mathematics world, leading his team to propose a new method based on the deformation theory of Ricci flow, which solved a special case of the Poincaré conjecture in non-compact manifolds. For non-compact three-dimensional manifolds with asymptotic nonnegative curvature, they proved that the topology of the manifold can be completely classified under specific volume growth conditions.

This achievement extends the classic Poincaré conjecture, namely the compact case, to the more general non-compact case, providing a new tool for understanding the large-scale structure of the universe.

Back then, he was incredibly successful, winning numerous awards, including the Wolf Prize and the Abel Prize.

Of course, now that he's old, it's time for him to enjoy life.

As people get older, they tend to reminisce. In the time it takes to open an email, he can already relive the glorious moments of receiving the award back then.

He enjoys his current job, reviewing papers and then using his academic influence to find suitable academic editors for these young papers. It's like panning for gold in the sand—a pretty good leisure game!
Upon opening the first email, "TopoLogic: Interpretable Road Topology Learning for Autonomous Driving," Hoffman frowned.

However, he still clicked on the attachment because the papers sent to his email had all undergone initial review by the editorial department and were at least of a certain standard.

This paper proposes an interpretable road topology generation framework that achieves real-time road topology inference in environments without high-precision maps by fusing graph neural networks and multimodal sensor data. Experiments on the OpenLane dataset show that the model improves the topology connectivity prediction accuracy by 12%, significantly enhancing the robustness of path planning in autonomous driving systems.

"???"

After reading this paper, Hoffman was completely bewildered.

How can such garbage be submitted to a journal of pure and applied mathematics?

Just publish some low-quality work in a computer science journal and call it a day!
He himself seemed to have forgotten that the journal he edited also accepted applied mathematics, but he himself worked on pure mathematics, which was just a matter of personal preference.

With the recent surge in interest in artificial intelligence, he has reviewed many papers on this topic and has a general understanding of what's going on.

You wouldn't say he's completely useless, but you also wouldn't say he's really that useful.

Because the data in papers related to artificial intelligence is often unreliable; many papers simply change parameters, fabricate data, and submit them as papers.

Unlike mathematics, which involves rigorous proof and derivation, where right is right and wrong is wrong, with clear distinctions between black and white!

Manuscript rejected!

I replied to the email without hesitation.

He does enjoy panning for gold in the sand, but that doesn't mean he has a good temper. In fact, many of his colleagues and friends describe him as a stubborn old man.

He then opened the next email.

The research team behind "Topological Data Analysis for Financial Market Anomaly Detection" applied persistent cohomology theory to high-frequency financial time series analysis, designing an anomaly detection algorithm based on topological features. This model successfully identified black swan events in the cryptocurrency market by recognizing multi-scale topological changes in candlestick charts, achieving an accuracy 18% higher than traditional statistical methods…

Manuscript rejected!

"Deep Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Control of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems"......

No, no, no...

After rejecting seven or eight papers in a row, Hoffman became increasingly irritable. He even rejected one or two papers that he might have otherwise approved, such as the optimization algorithm for complex flow problems of non-Newtonian fluids in industrial pipelines, which was quite good, but he was now a bit out of his mind.

call!
I'm done watching, time for lunch!

Hoffman downed his coffee in one gulp, stood up with a flourish, and was already contemplating whether to have roasted pig's trotters or beef rolls for lunch.

Then, he suddenly saw the title of the next email—A Special Solution Method for Cubic Diophantine Equations.

A special solution to a cubic Diophantine equation?
Hoffman sat down again. After finishing his cup of coffee, he suddenly felt less hungry.

Among a pile of artificial intelligence-related papers, the sudden appearance of a pure mathematics paper was truly refreshing, and even improved Hoffman's mood considerably.

"Read this paper first!"

This decision wasn't difficult to make; it would only take about ten minutes anyway.

Transform the equation into an elliptic curve to solve the Diophantine equation.

Yes, that's standard practice!

Finding rational numbers, that's right!
Ok?
Addition of chords and tangents?

interesting!
Hoffman quickly picked up a pen and paper from the side of his desk and began to work out calculations on the draft paper.

An hour passed like a grain of sand disappearing into the river of time without causing a ripple, but unfortunately, Hoffman, immersed in the world of mathematics, did not notice.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Duke University,

Dean of the School of Mathematics and editor-in-chief of the Duke Mathematics Journal, Dobesie, walked past the experimental building. Suddenly, as if she had thought of something, she turned and walked into Bryant's office. Since she was already there, she might as well take the opportunity to urge him on the manuscript.

Bryant was engrossed in his work at his desk, pens flying across the paper, racking his brains to calculate something.

Dobessie didn't disturb him. As a fellow mathematician, she knew how wonderful it was for a mathematician to be immersed in inspiration.

Half an hour passed relentlessly.
Bryant finally looked up from his desk, his face full of frustration; clearly, the result hadn't been pleasant.

Then he finally saw Dobessi, and his previously dejected face immediately broke into a bright smile. "Oh, dear Professor Dobessi, what brings you here?"

“You have a manuscript that’s been in your hands for four weeks. You’d better hurry up. Our review process takes about six weeks, so you can’t ruin your reputation.”

Dobessi cut to the chase, “You probably know how beneficial it is for us to have a high-impact journal!”

"Don't worry, Dobessi, I'll review the manuscript as soon as I finish my current work."

Bryant readily agreed, "You know, it won't take long!"

Nodding, Dobesie said nothing more and walked out of Bryant's office, unaware of the mocking smile on Bryant's face.

Although the paper was reviewed by two people in a double-blind review process, if he didn't pass, the paper wouldn't be published. He couldn't decide whether the paper could be published on his own, but he could drag it out until Oliver's paper was published.

(End of this chapter)