154: Chapter 154 Betting on Jiang Lin

August 23rd, evening.

The late summer night breeze still carried lingering summer heat as Shen Yanqiu sat in front of his computer screen, preparing for a live stream.

He was not supposed to stream tonight.

The three-month suspension promise made after the Jiangs Brick incident had not yet ended.

Therefore, before starting this live stream, he specially turned off gifts and commercial promotions, leaving only a public notice as the title.

On the computer screen, the title bar of the live stream backstage was already filled out.

[After Jiangs Brick: How to View the Second Big Problem of a Young Mathematician]

This title was temporarily changed by him in the afternoon, and could even be said to be the product of compromise after forcefully suppressing the impulse in his heart.

The initial version was much sharper and matched his consistent streaming style.

[Jiang Lin is Going to Prove PFR? The Second Round of the Genius Myth]

After writing that initial title, he pondered over it for a full five minutes, and finally hit the backspace key stroke by stroke to delete it.

It was not because this title was not attractive enough.

With his intuition from years of doing science popularization self-media, if that title were used, the number of viewers in the live stream tonight would definitely break one hundred thousand within ten minutes of starting, and the bullet comments would flood the entire screen like snowflakes.

The name Jiang Lin was no longer an ordinary traffic keyword nowadays, but a huge traffic vortex.

Gaokao 749 points, creator of the aperiodic tiling problem Jiangs Brick, iccm mathematics gold medal winner, founder of Low Entropy Workshop...

Among these tags, picking any single one out was enough for a bunch of marketing accounts to chew over, edit, and analyze for a full three days.

Let alone now that there was one more heavyweight term—PFR.

Shen Yanqiu's backstage private messages had already been blown up more than two hours ago.

The red unread message prompt turned into a conspicuous 99+, and was still jumping at a speed visible to the naked eye.

He casually clicked open a few of them, all of which were intense emotional venting and interrogation.

"Teacher Shen, what is your take on Jiang Lin working on PFR?"

"You bet wrong on Jiangs Brick last time and got heavily slapped by reality. Do you dare to bet again this time?"

"What level is the closure of PFR under the Finite Field Model, and how does it compare to the last aperiodic tiling in terms of awesomeness?"

"You kept shouting not to create idols back then, but now Jiang Lin has won the iccm mathematics gold medal. Do you still think it's creating idols? Doesn't your face hurt?"

"Come out and speak, stop playing dead. If you have guts, stream tonight!"

...

Below this last private message, there was even a screenshot from one of his live stream clips a few months ago.

In the screenshot, Shen Yanqiu was sitting under the same study lighting, with furrowed brows and a resolute expression, saying sternly to the camera: "I am not denying that young people might have mathematical talent. What I oppose is the genius myth without sufficient peer review. Mathematics is a discipline that does not believe in miracles; it only believes in logical closed loops."

This sentence itself was not wrong.

At least at the time he uttered those words, Shen Yanqiu genuinely believed there was nothing wrong with it.

The Chinese internet had experienced too many similar bizarre spectacles.

Child prodigies, packaged competition resumes, SCI papers ghostwritten by mercenaries, false endorsements from overseas prestigious schools, and group carnivals by marketing accounts.

And then one day, it collapsed with a loud crash, and people suddenly dug out watered-down results, mentors secretly packaging resumes, and fake qualifications.

And every time before a house collapse, countless loyal fans would stand on the moral high ground and accuse: "You people just can't stand to see a Chinese genius do well, you're just jealous."

Shen Yanqiu hated this sentence the most.

Because it crudely lumped all reasonable and scientific reviews into low-level jealousy.

Therefore, when Jiang Lin's preprint on aperiodic tiling first broke out of the circle on a large scale, he instinctively stood on the side of skepticism.

An ordinary high school senior suddenly pulled out a beautiful construction sufficient to end the single-tile problem, without a complete academic resume foundation or endorsement from a mature mentor chain.

Yet external media couldn't wait to pile grand terms like eighteen-year-old genius, Chinese youth, and new page in the history of mathematics onto his thin shoulders.

Shen Yanqiu's judgment at the time was not complex, and could even be said to be an inevitability based on experience.

The more a story was as pretty as a novel, the more one must be vigilant and wait for the proof of the mathematical community.

However, subsequent developments exceeded the predictions of all his empirical models.

When Professor Kaplan raised the fatal Level-7 objection at the academic conference, the entire internet was waiting for Jiang Lin to make a fool of himself. As a result, Jiang Lin only took seventeen minutes to patch out a perfect boundary obstacle proof.

Giangs Brick was officially released.

Following closely was the 45-minute report at the ICM.

The heavy hammer of the iccm mathematics gold medal fell, and the nature of the matter underwent earth-shaking changes.

Jiang Lin was no longer a talented high school student living only in media tags; he had been officially accepted and placed into the most rigorous evaluation system of the global mathematical community.

That kind of recognition—reviewed by top peers, repeatedly questioned, and publicly verified—was a product of completely two dimensions compared to trending searches pumped by paid trolls on the internet.

Shen Yanqiu took a deep breath and clicked open a document on his desktop.

That was the live stream outline he had sorted out by pushing aside everything this afternoon and locking himself in the study.

He moved his mouse and hovered over the fourth part.

[Part Four: I got the manuscript, but I am not qualified to review it.]

This was the hardest sentence to speak tonight, and also the most troublesome one.

Around 10:00 AM today, a PDF titled PFR v1.0》 was transferred into several small-scale advanced mathematics discussion groups where Shen Yanqiu was a member.

This was not the reviewed version from the internal closed-door meeting of the Tsinghua University Mathematical Sciences Center, not the peer-review version filled with dense annotations in the hands of Professor Han Yanshan and Ding Jian, nor was it the working version where Jiang Lin might continue to adjust the presentation order and explanatory text in the future.

But rather a preprint PDF with a complete structure, clear table of contents, and formed main theorems and appendices.

As a science popularization big V with certain connections in the circle, Shen Yanqiu got it at the first moment.

To be precise, it wasn't sent to him specifically by someone wanting him to study it, but rather many people in the group, and even the entire mathematical science popularization circle, were waiting for him to speak out after reading it.

They expected him to find a logical loophole like tearing apart science cranks in the past, or declare a new miracle like believers.

He picked up the iced Americano by his hand and took a big gulp; the bitter liquid flowed down his throat, forcibly waking up his nerves a bit.

Subsequently, he reopened that PDF.

In the center of the pristine white page, below the title was the concise author name: Jiang Lin.

Without any title, without any affiliation prefix.

He scrolled the wheel, flipping down the table of contents.

Part One: Additive Structure of the Finite Field Model.

Part Two: Multi-Scale Structure Compression and Spectral Cluster Indexing.

Part Three: Density Threshold Interval and Entropy Fall Budget.

Part Four: Indexing of Degenerate Cases.

Part Five: Marton Bridge.

Appendix C-2: Repeated Payment Isolation under Non-Uniform Density Shells.

In the first two sections, Shen Yanqiu could barely keep up with the train of thought.

The abstract and introduction sections were written with exceptional restraint, and Jiang Lin clearly explained with an objective brush: under the Finite Field Model, the structural compression induced by small doubling can be pushed to the polynomial cost interval through a set of auditable multi-scale accounts.

Meanwhile, the Marton entropy formalism provided a brand-new language for measuring degrees of freedom payments, capable of reinterpreting the loss of partial combinatorial structures as a pure entropy control problem.

This idea of combining Additive Combinatorics and information-theoretic entropy lemmas was extremely stunning, but also immensely profound.

Shen Yanqiu gritted his teeth and could barely understand the general framework of the first two sections.

However, until entering the third section, starting from the lemma numbered Lemma 3.4, the technical density of the proof suddenly showed an exponential rise.

The symbols in the paper were not fancy; it could even be said that Jiang Lin had very deliberately avoided creating new terms and tried to use the universally accepted mathematical language in the industry.

Yet the more it was like this, the more one could see the terrifying threshold of this paper.

Because the real difficulty was never in the symbols themselves, but in the huge accounting system represented behind each symbol.

How to index each spectral cluster in multi-dimensional space?

How does each density shell precisely enter the preset threshold interval?

Which segment of entropy drop has already paid its cost?

Which segment of loss has simply been cleverly transferred to high dimensions?

Which degenerate case must be eliminated separately before iteration?

Which seemingly minor and absorbable error would actually produce an avalanche effect of redundant computation in the next round of structural compression?

...

At 5:00 PM, when Shen Yanqiu read up to here, he stopped for the first time.

He picked up his mobile phone and sent a WeChat message to a friend doing a postdoc at the Mathematical Sciences Center of Tsinghua University: "Have you read Jiang Lin's PFR manuscript? For the part after Lemma 3.4, regarding the allocation of the entropy fall budget, how is the logical chain closed?"

An hour later, the friend replied with a voice message, his voice permeated with thick fatigue and hoarseness: "Don't ask me. I've been reading the manuscript since I got it at one o'clock this afternoon, and I just finished deriving the spectral cluster indexing of the second section. I can't get into the third section at all; the multi-scale construction inside is too complex. My mentor said this part might require extremely high-order Fourier analysis techniques. My brain is numb now, and I feel like an illiterate."

Even a proper mathematics postdoc felt despair, let alone a blogger like him who had long left the forefront of scientific research and turned to science popularization.

At this very instant, Shen Yanqiu realized with extreme clarity that he was completely unqualified to judge whether it was right or wrong anymore.

This feeling was even more depressing than finding an obvious loophole in a paper.

If a loophole were found, he could be excited, take a screenshot, start a live stream immediately, circle it on the screen with a red pen, and say loudly: "Look, the logic here is not self-consistent, this inequality scaling has a problem."

But when he faced a proof chain whose full picture he couldn't even fully see, all excitement and superiority as a big V vanished into thin air, leaving only naked sobriety.

He could no longer use "I don't understand, so it must have a problem" to replace objective judgment, nor could he use "this pile of formulas looks great and the format is very standard, so it's most likely correct" to replace judgment.

These two behaviors were essentially a desecration of mathematics and a kind of intellectual laziness.

The time in the lower right corner of the computer screen jumped to 20:18.

There were two final minutes left in the live stream countdown.

Not yet started, in the black-screen live stream room, bullet comments were already scrolling wildly, densely intertwining together.

"Here it comes, occupying front row seats!"

"Teacher Shen, are you going to bet again tonight? You didn't get banned last time, do you dare to gamble big this time?"

"Are you betting on the three-month suspension again this time?"

"Jiang Lin has already won the iccm mathematics gold medal, do you as a science popularization UP host still dare to come out and question him?"

"Stop clowning around, wasn't flipping over last time ugly enough?"

"Waiting for Master Shen to pontificate."

...

Shen Yanqiu quietly looked at these bullet comments full of hostility, mockery, and spectator mentality, and couldn't help curving his lips into a self-deprecating smile.

He knew all too well what these onlookers wanted.

The vast majority of people were not here to listen to a PFR background lecture. What they wanted was an attitude, a conflict, a judgment that could be forwarded.

What they wanted to hear was simply a black-and-white attitude, a dramatic conflict.

Support, or oppose.

Hype to the max, or expose as fake.

Bet on Jiang Lin becoming a supreme god, or hope that Shen Yanqiu flips over once more.

The internet's algorithm and ecosystem had long been accustomed to dimensionality-reducing and compressing all extremely complex scientific problems that required countless days and nights to verify into buttons that people could use to take sides and vent emotions.

But tonight, he didn't want to press this button.

At 8:20 PM, the live stream started on time.

The moment the camera lit up, the screen was pushed to the screens of tens of thousands of people.

Shen Yanqiu was wearing a simple solid-color shirt, sitting in his study.

The bookshelf behind him was still filled with bulky professional books, exactly the same as the background of countless past live streams.

The light hit his face, looking somewhat pale, but his gaze was exceptionally steady.

He didn't smile and greet the bullet comments with small talk like he usually did, nor did he use a relaxed and joking tone to set the rhythm for a warm-up.

Instead, he cut straight to the chase.

"Good evening everyone. Tonight's live stream won't chat about other things; we'll talk directly about Jiang Lin and his PFR."

As soon as these words came out, the density of bullet comments in the live stream room instantly rose geometrically, and the entire screen was almost plastered with white fonts, making even Shen Yanqiu's face hard to see clearly.

Shen Yanqiu stared at the lens and talked eloquently: "Let's state the conclusion first. Regarding this PFR manuscript of Jiang Lin currently circulating, tonight, I will not make any conclusive judgment on its correctness. I neither say it is right nor say it is wrong."

The bullet comments that were originally scrolling wildly stopped for a ghostly instant after these words were spoken, as if tens of thousands of typing fingers were suspended in mid-air simultaneously.

Following closely, an even larger rebound erupted.

"Cowardly, you're chickening out just like that?"

"Weren't you quite brave when criticizing Jiangs Brick last time? What kind of rational-neutral person are you pretending to be now?"

"It seems Jiang Lin has really become a god, beating even the toughest trolls in the circle into submission."

"Rational science popularization, choosing silence—what a way to preserve oneself."

"If you don't dare to speak, get off the stream, wasting time."

Facing the screen full of mockery, Shen Yanqiu's expression didn't change in the slightest.

He was not interrupted in his rhythm by these emotional words, and continued: "The reason why I am not making a judgment is not because I haven't obtained the manuscript, nor is it because I dare not speak."

He tossed out another heavyweight bombshell.

The bullet comments in the live stream room noticeably paused again.

Many people were waiting for his next turning point.

Shen Yanqiu operated his mouse, opened that PDF file, and directly cast it onto the live stream screen via streaming software.

"Today, I did indeed obtain a complete manuscript. Everyone can see on the screen that this is neither an internal review version from a closed-door meeting of the Mathematical Sciences Center nor any private material with annotations from top scholars, but rather a complete preprint PDF that has already been circulating within a small, high-level mathematics discussion group. The title, abstract, derivation of the main theorem, lemma numbering, and appendix structure are all here."

The bullet comments completely exploded at this moment.

"Holy shit, there really is a manuscript? Is this a worldwide premier?"

"Teacher Shen, hurry up and talk, stop keeping us in suspense!"

"You've already gotten the full version and yet you're not making a judgment. Have you already seen through his flaws and are preparing to drop a bombshell?"

"Screenshot! Screenshot!"

Shen Yanqiu ignored the urging, moved his mouse cursor to the bottom of the table of contents page, and enlarged one of the lines of text so that it occupied the central position of the screen.

[ Appendix C-2: Isolation of Double Spending under Non-uniform Density Shells ]

"Take this section for example," Shen Yanqiu pointed at the screen.

"I can translate its title for everyone: Isolation of Double Spending under Non-uniform Density Shells. Through the mere scraps of Additive Combinatorics I learned in the past, I can roughly guess what problem it wants to handle—what it aims to solve is how certain local structures can avoid being repeatedly counted into the global entropy budget during the process of multi-scale hierarchical compression. It is more like prescribing, before the main proof is invoked, which local structures have already paid their bills and which are not yet qualified to be merged back into the global budget."

He paused to let the audience digest these extremely obscure academic vocabulary terms, then raised his head, his gaze piercing through the lens to face the many eyes hidden behind the screen.

"But I must be honest with everyone: because my mathematics level is insufficient, I have completely no ability to review whether this section he wrote is correct or not. Even from the second half of the third section onward, I could no longer understand his deductive logic."

As soon as these words came out, the entire live stream room fell into a brief chaos.

Netizens who were used to watching big influencers pointing fingers at the country and knowing everything rarely encountered a streamer who admitted their incompetence to their face like this.

"Ah, is it over just like that?"

"If you can't understand it, why are you hosting a live stream? Just purely leeching off traffic, right?"

"Then what is the meaning of this live stream episode? You got it but aren't talking about it, intentionally leaving us hanging?"

"Admitting that you don't understand is actually quite difficult; at least it's better than those marketing accounts that clearly don't understand yet forcefully pretend to know."

"Good grief, this is truly a confession session."

Looking at the skepticism and disappointment in the bullet comments, Shen Yanqiu not only did not get angry, but instead felt an unprecedented sense of ease.

It was a sense of relief after unloading the burden of omniscience and omnipotence.

His nerves actually became lighter.

He switched to the next slide.

Black background with white text, on which was only a short and heavy sentence.

[ Empirical models cannot replace domain review. ]

"This is the sentence I most want to say to everyone tonight, and in all my years of doing popular science."

Shen Yanqiu's voice became somewhat low.

"In the Jiangs Brick incident a few months ago, I openly expressed my suspicion of Jiang Lin in the live stream room. Many people think I regret it; in fact, my mistake at the time did not lie in raising the skepticism itself. An eighteen-year-old high school student suddenly produces an exquisite construction sufficient to change the classic problem of aperiodic tiling, and the media rapidly magnifies it within a day, with the public beginning a carnival of deity-making. In that environment, any normal and responsible science communicator should have stood out to remind everyone to cool down, to remind everyone to wait for a complete mathematical proof and peer review from top journals."

"This is the bottom line of science."

He took a deep breath, facing his past directly.

"But where did I go wrong? I went wrong because, under the coercion of emotions, I pushed this rational reminder forward into a premature judgment. I overly relied on my past empirical models for identifying pseudo-geniuses, fake papers, and academic packaging, and then used this crude set of models to forcibly adjudicate an abnormal object that truly exceeded the boundaries of my cognition."

The study room was very quiet, with only his steady voice echoing in the air.

"Everyone must understand a logic: having seen ninety-nine deity-making scams in the past does not mean that the one-hundredth extraordinary object you encounter must also be a scam. Rational skepticism is not a reflexive denial carried out to elevate oneself; rational support is also not the reflexive flattery of brainless fans."

"True rationality is acknowledging the limitations of human cognition and knowing at which link the judgment chain should close. For the current PFR manuscript, the power of this closed loop does not lie in my hands, Shen Yanqiu, nor in the Weibo hot searches, nor on your keyboards; it lies solely in the hands of those few dozen top Additive Combinatorics and analytic number theory experts globally."

At 8:56 PM.

Nearly forty minutes into the broadcast, to everyone's surprise, even though Shen Yanqiu did not throw out any conspiracy theories or make any radical assertions, the number of people in the live stream room not only did not drop, but instead rose to a quite exaggerated figure.

The real online viewer count broke one hundred thousand, which can be called a miracle for a hardcore popular science live stream room.

Shen Yanqiu switched the slide on the screen once again, which densely listed several lines of professional questions.

Can the key encapsulation lemma still retain its conditional structure after multi-scale compression?

At the boundary of the non-uniform density shell, do hidden double spendings exist?

Regarding the indexing of degenerate cases, has Jiang Lin's classification exhausted all topological possibilities?

When using the Marton entropy form as a bridge, were undetected exponential losses secretly introduced?

Where exactly should the migration boundary between the conclusions drawn under the Finite Field Model and more general scenarios be drawn to be considered absolutely safe?

...

"Everyone look at these questions on the screen," Shen Yanqiu guided with a laser pointer on the screen. "These are a portion of the core review points that I spent an afternoon, combined with discussions from industry peers, barely able to list. I can only list this many. The most I can do now is throw these questions out, explain the historical background of the PFR Conjecture clearly, and tell the public what true peer review is actually looking at and calculating."

"What I do is science communication; my job is translation, not manuscript review, and even less so acting as the final referee for the PFR proof chain."

In the bullet comments, stubborn netizens were still spamming and asking: "Then what is the meaning of this live stream episode of yours, isn't this all nonsense?"

Looking at this floating bullet comment, Shen Yanqiu picked up the Americano on the table that was no longer so icy, took a sip, and then smiled pleasantly at the lens.

"What is the meaning? The meaning is that on this noisy night, I want to use the live stream room of tens of thousands of people to tell everyone one thing—"

"Do not let the internet flatten a truly serious, beautiful mathematical problem that requires humanity's top brains to struggle to climb into a cheap entertainment match like whether Shen Yanqiu bets on Jiang Lin today."

His tone was solemn as never before.

"Jiang Lin does not need me to place bets. The proof of PFR will not become correct because of my support, nor will it be reduced to fallacy because of my opposition. The laws of mathematics are far more ruthless and much purer than human public opinion."

"If Jiang Lin's proof has errors, it will definitely die within the rigorous logical chain, dying under a certain unclosable formula, and be ruthlessly pointed out by peers. If it is correct, then it will also uprightly live within every line of an unassailable proof chain, ultimately being carved onto the monument of mathematical history."

After these words fell, in the live stream room with one hundred thousand people online, the density of bullet comments visibly decreased to the naked eye.

For a few seconds, the screen was no longer filled with mockery and spam, but a hesitant pause.

It was as if everyone was digesting the weight within this passage.

A few seconds later, the bullet comments began to scroll again, but the style had completely changed.

"Well said, this episode is truly far more hardcore than imagined."

"Indeed, last time during the nationwide carnival of Jiangs Brick, everyone was too anxious, anxious to create deities, anxious to destroy deities."

"The most outrageous thing about Jiang Lin is not how many problems he solved, but that he used absolute strength to forcefully force internet big influencers like Shen Yanqiu to mature."

"Upstairs, stop awkwardly praising Shen; he just finally learned to shut his mouth in fields he doesn't understand."

"But you have to admit, as a public figure, knowing when to shut up and daring to admit that one doesn't understand is in itself an extremely high level of professional literacy."

...

"So, everyone give it some patience, and wait for people in truly relevant directions to give confirmation opinions."

After this sentence was spoken, the bullet comments in the live stream room experienced a brief trough.

However, just at this moment, a striking message with dazzling special effects suddenly popped out, hovering above the screen and breaking the brief silence.

"Teacher Shen, then let me ask a most realistic question. Suppose, I mean suppose, Jiang Lin's set of proofs is ultimately confirmed to be correct without error by the mathematical community, what level of achievement is this? What practical honors can he get, can he win the fields medal?"

As soon as this message came out, it instantly hit the sweet spot of all onlookers.

Compared to the obscure Finite Field Model and entropy drop, what the general public cares more about, and can understand better, are the awards at the peak of the pyramid and the landing of the deity-making myth.

The bullet comments surged again.

"That's right, stop rambling about those things we can't understand, give the conclusion directly, can this wave achieve legendary godhood?"

...

Seeing this question, Shen Yanqiu looked at the scrolling text on the screen, his expression becoming very solemn.

After several seconds, he slowly spoke.

"Actually, I don't really want to answer this question, because it pulls the topic back to a secular level once again. But I understand everyone's curiosity, so I will talk about it once; after talking, the stream ends."

"First of all, don't ask about the fields medal right off the bat."

"The fields medal is not a hot search list; it's not proven today and awarded tomorrow. It is held once every four years, and the review cycle, age limits, domain balance, and international evaluations are all very complex. Jiang Lin's most important matter right now is also not immediately winning some ultimate award."

"What is truly important is that if this manuscript is ultimately confirmed to be correct without error, from this moment on, he will be re-priced by the entire mathematical community."

"This kind of re-pricing will not manifest as a certificate of award first."

"It will manifest as resources first."

The bullet comments noticeably slowed down.

After evaluating the weight of the matter in his mind, Shen Yanqiu raised his first finger.

"The first layer is the candidate pool for youth mathematics awards."

"You are most familiar with the fields medal, but there are still many earlier-landing, more concrete youth awards and directional awards in the mathematical community."

"The proof of the PFR Conjecture deeply relies on several sets of tools such as Additive Combinatorics, higher-order Fourier analysis, and entropy methods, which have clearly corresponding awards in the mathematical community. First is the Clay Research Award from the Clay Mathematics Institute; this award does not look at age, but only at whether there is a substantive mathematical breakthrough in that year. Ben Green and Terence Tao won this award back then when they proved the arithmetic progression problem in primes. Further down is the Salem Prize; it was originally a youth award in the field of harmonic analysis, but over the past twenty years, it has become the de facto award benchmark in the direction of Additive Combinatorics."

"In fact, as long as Jiang Lin's set of proofs holds true, all award lists aimed at young mathematicians cannot bypass the name Jiang Lin."

Someone in the bullet comments asked: "Is there prize money? I heard Jiang Lin's so-called workshop is quite short on money?"

"Yes," Shen Yanqiu nodded. "The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation specifically honors early-career researchers who have achieved important results. In addition to extremely high academic reputation, it directly provides a generous prize money of one hundred thousand dollars."

Before the bullet comments could begin to marvel, Shen Yanqiu raised his second finger.

"The second layer is the non-standard channel of top research institutions."

"Prize money is the most secondary thing in the academic world. Within the circle, resources more core than prize money and awards are called academic privileges."

His voice sank, carrying the awe that only practitioners could understand.

"An ordinary person's path is undergraduate, PhD, postdoc, tenure-track, tenured, climbing up step by step. But the mathematical community does not completely fail to recognize outliers; truly large enough results can directly pierce through conventional resume templates."

"Top research seats such as the Clay Research Fellowship essentially look at the candidate's research quality and whether he has the potential to become a mathematical leader. Places like Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study do not only accept people purely based on tables."

"If PFR is confirmed, what Jiang Lin faces will no longer be such a simple question as 'applying for a PhD program'."

"Instead, it will be the best mathematical institutions in the world starting to discuss how to design a non-standard research path for an eighteen-year-old."

The live stream room grew quiet.

Ordinary education rat races appeared completely eclipsed in front of this dimension-reducing strike-like set of rules.

"Returning domestically, the reaction will only be fiercer and more complex," Shen Yanqiu continued. "Relevant departments will most likely open a green channel, and being exceptionally selected for the national top young talent program is only the starting point. Vertical scientific research funding, an independent exclusive laboratory, and the power to directly bypass all seniority to form a research group may all open up to him."

Shen Yanqiu leaned against the back of his chair, his gaze falling back onto the complex PDF manuscript on the table.

"So, if the hypothesis holds, Jiang Lin will rely on his own solitary strength to punch through all existing academic evaluation systems."

"So, do you all understand now? Why is it that those top scholars who obtained the manuscript today have not a single one of them spoken out in public occasions up to now?"

"Because everyone is waiting, waiting for this manuscript to undergo the most rigorous refinement. Because everyone knows that once this proof is confirmed, what awaits this young man will be the unreserved resource inclination of the entire global academic community."