208: Chapter 208 Five Hundred Dollars, Nineteen Questions

On the second floor of the Mathematical Sciences Center, inside Jiang Lin's Research Support Unit.

Just as Jiang Lin placed the list of five-hundred-dollar problems on the desk, the laser printer in the corner jammed on the seventy-sixth page.

Gu Mingche pulled open the rear cover, and half of the paper rolled up in the rollers came out with it, leaving only a crumpled Princeton emblem on the top right corner.

"There are currently two problems with this invitation."

He pinched the edge of the paper and slowly pulled it back out.

"The dates clash, and the school emblem is almost gone."

The academic secretary was still replying to the emails accumulated from the morning, and upon hearing this, she raised her head from behind the screen.

"The dates are just tentative, and you can handle the school emblem."

Three of the four chairs near the door were already occupied by documents, and on the remaining one sat three paper bags brought back from the cafeteria.

That morning's class had ended too late, so a few of them had hastily eaten lunch at the cafeteria, and Gu Mingche had brought back three more portions for those left behind in the office, with the change receipt still pinned beneath the lunch boxes.

Jiang Lin draped his coat by the window and pulled a blue folder from the very top of the chair seat.

The blackboard writing left on the left half of the classroom that morning still needed to be used for the afternoon's combinatorial geometry seminar, but the invitations sent regarding that new theorem had already arrived ahead of time, crowding this temporary office on the second floor.

There were a total of nine event invitations in the folder, six of which also provided video connection plans. The earliest session was scheduled for November 16th, and the furthest one was willing to wait until the coming spring.

Seven of them wanted Jiang Lin to fully introduce the counterexample to the unit distance conjecture, one invited him to talk about his research methodology of continuously tackling world-class problems at the age of eighteen, and the last one had even drafted the title for him.

[From Inspiration to Theorem]

The academic secretary pushed over a schedule summary table.

"Three need a reply today, two will announce next month's agenda tomorrow morning, and another is willing to rearrange the entire week's lecture sequence around your schedule."

"Reply to the one willing to change the agenda first."

Jiang Lin flipped to the signature page of the inviter.

"The more they are willing to accommodate our time, the less we can let them change it in vain."

After reviewing the audience scope, public format, and proposed topics of the nine reports one by one, he left a slot on the afternoon of November 19th.

[New Lower Bounds for the Planar Unit Distance Problem: Construction, Verification, and Unresolved Boundaries]

"This session will be publicly organized by the university, with all handouts, video recordings, and on-site Q&A records fully open."

Jiang Lin moved the other six repetitive invitations into the unified reply column.

"The remaining ones should first provide complete materials, and we will arrange them separately once there are new results or new discussion topics."

The academic secretary pointed to the very last page.

"How should we reply to 'From Inspiration to Theorem'?"

"The proof already has over six hundred pages of public materials, but inspiration cannot be organized into a reproducible attachment."

A soft click of plastic clasps snapping shut came from behind the printer.

Gu Mingche poked his head out.

"This personal advantage can be temporarily retained, lest one day even your research methodology has to undergo a cleanroom reconstruction."

"With currently only a single sample, it is indeed unsuitable for scaling up."

The academic secretary translated this sentence into wording suitable for an official email, and the reply column quickly lost six red to-do markers.

The printer still occupied the corner with its rear cover open, and there were still forty-two pages of documents waiting to be restored in the queue.

Gu Mingche temporarily unplugged the data cable, lest the machine spit out all the remaining tasks in one breath right after the rollers were cleared.

"Don't print the next item yet."

He glanced at the old list on the desk.

"The administrators of the five hundred dollars have replied, the electronic version is right in the mailbox, and the paper can be wasted later."

The academic secretary opened the email received at 12:56.

This reply letter provided further clarification regarding the bounty status in the morning's electronic archive.

The five-hundred-dollar amount record was valid, and Jiang Lin's refutation of the conjecture was also within the scope of the bounty.

The [Waiting for Administrator Confirmation and Disbursement] on the archive page belonged to a pending status and did not yet constitute a payment decision.

The paper needed to be officially published in a reliable peer-reviewed mathematics journal before the administrators could process the claim based on the official version and the confirmation results of the mathematical community.

"The amount has been confirmed, but the money has to wait for the paper."

The academic secretary put this reply letter and the journal fast-track notification into the same file bag.

"That status this morning looked a bit like a bank processing it."

"The open problems archive is responsible for recording mathematical progress, not serving as a cross-border remittance counter."

Jiang Lin took out his phone and replied to a news screenshot that Zhang Xiufen had sent into the family chat group during lunch.

The title on the screenshot read [Eighteen-Year-Old Freshman Overturns Seventy-Six-Year Conjecture, Wins Five-Hundred-Dollar Bounty].

Zhang Xiufen asked very practically underneath:

[Has this money already been received, or do we still need to process paperwork?]

Jiang Lin sent over the conditions he had just confirmed.

[The amount is correct, but it can only be claimed after the paper is officially published. It won't arrive in the account for now.]

Zhang Xiufen replied quickly:

[Then let's not record it as income yet.]

Jiang Jianguo followed up with a sentence:

[Wait for the official receipt.]

Gu Mingche had already installed the printer's rear cover and turned around to see Jiang Lin pulling out that crumpled debt note from the back of the five-hundred-dollar problem list.

Seven steamed buns, four cups of soy milk, two bowls of instant noodles, and two printing fees, totaling 107 yuan and 6 jiao.

Behind the second printing fee was a line of small text:

[R-003 Reprint Consumables]

Jiang Lin transferred the money according to the amount.

Gu Mingche's phone, placed on top of the printer, vibrated with a sound.

"The US dollars are still outside the journal, how did the RMB arrive first?"

"The peer review for this debt has concluded."

"Can the night shifts during the verification period be settled together?"

"Yes, the Research Support Unit has a labor declaration form, and someone happens to be on duty today."

The academic secretary took out a blank form from the drawer and handed it across the desk to Gu Mingche.

"Dates, work content, result archiving locations, and actual duration must all be filled out. If any attachment is missing, it will be returned."

Gu Mingche looked at the form, and then at the nineteen unprocessed problem emails on the desk.

"Turns out the strict material entry has already been on internal trial run ahead of schedule."

He wrote [Cleared] in the lower right corner of the debt note, tucked it into his notebook, and pinned the labor form on top of the printer first.

Jiang Lin spread out the one-page summaries of the nineteen incoming letters.

These emails did not all arrive today; the earliest one had been waiting for four days, and the latest three were sent after the public verification status turned green.

According to the original permissions of the temporary Research Support Unit, these incoming letters first completed deduplication, virus checking, and attachment registration, and were scheduled into this afternoon's initial problem entry review.

The first one used two pages to introduce the research background, with the problem itself buried in the nineteenth-page attachment, and even wrote three versions for the range of quantifiers that needed to be proved.

The second one listed twelve failure routes, each stopping at the four words "attempt invalid," without attaching a single original calculation record.

The third one was only a little over nine hundred words, yet it clearly wrote down the object, the best known result, the route it had taken, and the specific step it hoped Jiang Lin would judge.

Jiang Lin flipped the jammed paper to the blank side and wrote down three requirements:

[Accurate boundaries of the problem]

[Best current results]

[A verifiable failure route or counterexample]

"With all three complete, enter them into the problem catalog."

"What about those that only write 'please take a moment to look'?"

"Ask the other party to specify exactly where to look for that glance."

The academic secretary entered the three requirements into the unified reply template and brought up the email tags.

"Two of them wrote 'very urgent' in the subject line, and one of them had a deadline of yesterday."

"Yesterday's date has already eliminated the expedited option for it."

Jiang Lin flipped to the project description of that email.

"When replying, write the responsibility boundaries clearly; temporary requests for help cannot become a patch for a research plan lacking reserved time."

"Should the urgency level still be retained?"

"Those involving running equipment, personal safety, or non-repeatable observation windows should go through the existing emergency interface separately."

Jiang Lin added a line next to the template:

[Ordinary research problems are sorted by materials and verifiability; the sender's position, institution, and email title do not change the priority.]

After the unified reply was saved, the academic secretary went through the nineteen-page summaries again according to the new standard.

Gu Mingche sat next to the printer, cleared the main text attachments set for automatic continuous printing in the queue, and kept only the one-page summary of each email.

Nine were marked as waiting for supplement, and most of the missing parts were accurate boundaries and re-examinable records.

Seven had clear destinations and could enter the Mathematical Sciences Center seminar, formal verification interface, or the research catalogs of relevant departments respectively.

The remaining three took up the least paper, but their attachment catalogs were thicker than the last.

The academic secretary dragged the first of them into the internal campus circulation system.

The applicant hoped to establish a two-year plan focusing on automated theorem proving and mathematical structure discovery, listing postdocs, research engineers, software maintenance personnel, and three cooperative institutions in the personnel list, with only Jiang Lin's name filled in the academic leader column.

After she selected the Mathematical Sciences Center, the budget for two research engineers and software maintenance turned gray.

Upon switching to the Department of Computer Science, the cross-departmental mathematics positions and long-term academic responsibilities were once again excluded from the project.

There was also Jiang Lin's Research Support Unit item on the page.

The academic secretary clicked into it, and the submit button immediately locked, with three missing permissions listed on the right:

[No independent project account]

[No personnel recruitment permissions]

[No long-term project main responsibility qualification]

"The applicant's materials are complete, yet the system requires me to delete some people first, or change the main responsibility method of the project for them."

She also brought up the second and third ones.

One came from the operation team of a large-scale scientific facility, hoping that Jiang Lin would lead the establishment of a long-term verification framework jointly participated in by numerical calculation, experiment, and observation.

Another discussed the long-term autonomy of multi-robots in complex environments, and the other party had prepared three-stage on-site data, cooperative units, and failure exit conditions.

The three emails spanned different disciplines, but the results falling into the system were the same.

Gu Mingche picked up the personnel page of the first one.

"The email title says 'please look at the problem', but the attachment is ready to send both the people and the project over together."

"When a problem is written to this extent, it naturally requires more than just a glance."

Jiang Lin read through the resource pages, responsibility pages, and exit conditions of the three materials one by one.

The plans provided by the other party were all considered serious, and the required time was calculated in years; the existing single-department entrances could only catch a portion of them.

If a main responsible unit were casually designated just to pass the system, the gray columns wouldn't disappear—they would only disappear from the table.

"Keep the original documents, and also keep the receipts of the three submission failures."

Jiang Lin dragged the first receipt into the application catalog.

"List the departments they involve, the required accounts and recruitment permissions, the duration, and external responsibilities on the front page."

"Then return it to the applicant?"

"The reason for return would settle on insufficient materials and mismatched facts."

Jiang Lin tapped the three missing permissions on the screen.

"Since it's stuck on our permissions, write our gap clearly."

The academic secretary opened the trial run schedule beside the desk.

"The Research Support Unit expires on November 24th, and these permissions cannot be obtained before expiration."

"Bring it to the expiration evaluation."

"The evaluation report originally only counts matters that have already circulated and been concluded."

"Add a column."

Jiang Lin put the three front pages together.

"If we only count things that are already done, the evaluation report cannot see what this mechanism is still lacking."

"Since these three matters are stuck on permissions, bring the stuck parts along."

The academic secretary pulled out a gray file basket from beside the shredder and moved the two boxes of staples inside into the cabinet.

She wrote four words on the label paper:

[Unable to Circulate]

She added another line in the lower right corner:

[Expiration Evaluation]

Gu Mingche reconnected the printer's data cable, deleted the forty-two pages of automatic continuous printing from the task list, and kept only the three front pages, resource pages, and system receipts.

"Nine pages."

He pressed the print button.

"Today, this machine can also be considered to have learned to save paper according to problem size."

The rollers spun again, and the first sheet of paper was smoothly delivered to the paper output slot.

The academic secretary divided the nine pages into three parts, stapled them separately, and wrote F-001, F-002, and F-003 in the upper right corners.

Jiang Lin created a new column in the trial run evaluation catalog and hooked the three numbers, system receipts, and required permissions into it one by one.

Unified replies had already been sent out for the nine emails waiting for supplementation, seven entered the existing catalog, and only the last three red markers remained in the mailbox out of the nineteen.

The academic secretary selected them and changed them to gray.

The gray file basket was pushed next to the archiving cabinet, and the three materials stood upright just right.

On the front page of the foremost F-001, the academic leader column still read Jiang Lin.

The main responsible unit column remained empty.