210: Chapter 210 Echo

On the second floor of the Mathematical Sciences Center, the window at the end of the corridor was half-open, and the morning light illuminated the dust motes on the temporary desk in meticulous detail.

The administrative assistant flipped over the Trial Operation Expiry Asset Disposal Form and, on the slightly rough blank back page, picked up a pen and wrote two lines of eye-catching large characters.

[Visiting Application]

[Position Materials]

Yesterday, two empty cardboard boxes waiting to hold a printer and internal telephone were casually stacked by the door; now, they were neatly placed on the left and right sides of the preparation office door, each filled with half a box of printed manuscripts.

These lightweight papers carried the academic weight from Paris, Bonn, Zurich, Princeton, Budapest, and more than a dozen universities domestically.

The manuscripts varied in thickness, ranging from a single sheet to more than forty pages.

The thinnest was a concise visiting inquiry letter, while the thickest not only contained a rigorously structured complete research plan and detailed résumés of three doctoral students, but also came with an explanatory form stating that they could cover all research funding by themselves.

Jiang Lin walked over from the top of the stairs, and when he reached the doorway, his gaze fell on the lower right corner of the doorplate.

The administrative assistant followed his gaze and checked it once more, a smile appearing on his lips: "The glue chosen this time is alright; it sticks very firmly, safely surviving at least the first night."

"The preparation period is six months." Jiang Lin looked at the doorplate and joked, "Should its durability index be raised a bit?"

The administrative assistant agreed with a beaming smile and handed the archive bag to Jiang Lin for his signature.

As soon as the tip of the pen fell, the three internal telephones in the office rang urgently at the same time, as if they had agreed upon it.

The academic secretary was quick-witted and deft; with one hand holding down the headset to answer the first phone, the other hand smoothly pushed the second one to the technical liaison nearby.

When the third phone rang for the fifth time, Professor Zhou Wendao, who had just stepped into the office, strode forward and snatched up the receiver.

"This is the preparation office of the Jiang Lin Interdisciplinary Research Center."

Just as Professor Zhou Wendao finished reporting this standard opening, the person on the other end of the line eagerly spoke for nearly a minute, speaking at a rapid pace with strong academic enthusiasm.

While listening, Professor Zhou Wendao pulled out a bright yellow sticky note from the cluttered desktop, picked up his pen, and wrote down only three core words.

[Six-Month Visit]

[Bringing a Group]

[Bringing Own Funding]

"Please send the materials to our archiving email, make sure the research plan is written clearly, and put the personnel and funding descriptions in the attachments." After replying, Professor Zhou Wendao hung the phone back on the landline, glanced down at the sticky note, and said to everyone, "Forty-seven years old, a full professor, planning to bring two postdoctoral fellows and three students here for half a year, asking if the center can allocate an exclusive discussion room for them."

The technical liaison didn't speak, only silently turning the real-time statistics page of the archiving email toward Jiang Lin.

The preparation announcement was released yesterday afternoon at five-twenty-six.

Over the past fourteen-plus hours, the inbox had been submerged like a tide, with four hundred and eighty-seven new emails added.

Among them, ninety-six came with complete résumés or visiting plans that could be directly evaluated.

The official position announcement was still quietly lying in the administrative assistant's folder pending release, but those fifteen full-time positions had already been inquired about fifty-two times in advance through various channels.

The wind direction was quietly changing.

The earliest batch of letters mostly wanted to invite Jiang Lin to give presentations.

Meanwhile, the emails squeezing into the queue this morning had completely changed direction.

Someone inquired whether they could come to Beijing to stay for three months for short-term cooperation.

Someone expressed a willingness to directly move ongoing core projects to the center.

There were also two small research teams that straightforwardly listed their requirements for computers, workstations, and blackboard space needed to move in.

The academic secretary clicked open an email that arrived across time zones at two in the morning.

The sender was a strong young scholar who had just obtained two heavyweight overseas postdoctoral offers, one of which came from a research group ranked in the global top three of his field.

In the email, he systematically and item-by-item listed the generous research conditions provided by the two offers.

But at the end of the email, he only asked one thing.

If he gave up these certain and smooth paths, could Jiang Lin's center allow him to spend a year focusing exclusively on the high-difficulty problem attached to the letter?

The core problem description in the attachment was only a mere two pages, but the failure records that followed took up a full eleven pages.

Professor Zhou Wendao glanced at the screen, immediately recognizing the name, and he had also read the other party's paper published just this year in a top journal.

"No matter which of these two offers he chooses, his future is very secure," Professor Zhou Wendao commented.

Jiang Lin did not carefully flip through those eleven densely packed pages of failure records to the very last page.

"That's why he is qualified to choose a harder road to walk." Jiang Lin put the heavy materials back in their original place, "Send him our position conditions and schedule; as for how to choose, leave it to him to decide."

Professor Zhou Wendao walked to the door, pulled out the topmost résumé from the [Visiting Application] cardboard box, flipped through two pages casually, and gently put it back.

"Before yesterday, they racked their brains trying to invite you over. Today, they have all changed their methods in unison, constantly asking if they can come over."

Jiang Lin picked up the résumé again and flipped directly to the research plan section.

The applicant detailedly reviewed the work of the past eight years in the first six pages, and only on the seventh page did they cut into the problem they prepared to conquer at the center.

As for the space of more than thirty pages that followed, it was all routes he had already tried, clearly failed boundary conditions, and the mathematical tools urgently needed for the next step.

This material was much longer than simply listing dozens of top papers, but in Jiang Lin's eyes, it was also much more useful than that string of flashy paper titles.

"Create a separate directory for materials that clearly write out research questions and failure records." Jiang Lin solemnly put the résumé into the safest spot of the [Visiting Application] cardboard box, "Publish the position announcement at the originally scheduled time; we won't conduct initial personnel screening today."

The academic secretary raised a hand and pointed to the row of file baskets by the wall that were stuffed full of various materials: "Then what about these ninety-six copies?"

"Let them wait for half a day first." Jiang Lin turned around, "The center has just been established; we must first do something more resembling what a research center should do than collecting résumés."

Gu Mingche happened to walk into the office holding a heavy hardcover folder and heard the last half sentence.

"It seems I came at a very fortuitous time."

He strode forward and placed the folder in front of Jiang Lin.

"The report version of the materials has been completely sorted out. The proof dependency graph, public attack catalog, independent reconstruction records by seven people, and the third-round clean-room verification results are all inside. R-003 only retains the index errata, and the main text version is still the one you initially delivered."

On the cover of the folder, the title of the paper that caused an uproar was printed in bold:

[ A Superlinear Lower Bound for Unit Distances in the Plane ]

That preprint was already completely public.

Seven top researchers from Bonn, Princeton, and Budapest rewrote more than 30,000 lines of code under the harsh condition of not touching any of the original author's code, and successfully constructed another family of planar point sets satisfying a positive exponent.

They verified that the number of unit distances could break through traditional linear cognition and reach a superlinear lower bound.

In the Erdős problem archive, the state of the corresponding conjecture had been ruthlessly changed to [disproved].

But the entire planar unit distance extremal problem, as a peak in the mathematical world, still maintained the [Open] state, waiting for deeper-level exploration.

Jiang Lin flipped to the structural page of the report, picked up his pen, crossed out the originally scheduled forty-five-minute proof overview, changed it to ninety minutes, and with a sweeping stroke later on, left a full hour for public questions.

"November 29th at nine in the morning." Gu Mingche glanced at the date to confirm, then asked, "Tuesday morning, do you have any other arrangements after six o'clock?"

"Anytime after six-zero-one is fine."

Gu Mingche wrote nine o'clock on the schedule, his pen pausing briefly on the line for six-zero-one.

In the end, he only shook his head helplessly, treating this as an overly precise wake-up time Jiang Lin had set for himself.

The office door had been open all along.

Two doctoral students who came to pick up seminar materials happened to pass by, caught a glance at the English title on the folder at the door, and their footsteps instantly paused.

"The public report on unit distances has been finalized?"

"November 29th at nine in the morning."

Gu Mingche raised the schedule and flashed it at them.

One of them took out his cell phone on the spot and sent an explosive message in the discussion class group of a hundred people.

The other person's cell phone vibrated continuously a dozen times right after.

"There are twenty-seven people in our class; I estimate all of them will come." That doctoral student swallowed a mouthful of saliva and poked his head into the crowded office again, "May I ask if we can stand in the back when the time comes?"

Professor Zhou Wendao walked back to the desk carrying the thin document bag he had just obtained, unpacking it as he said: "Wait until they decide how big of a venue to use before considering where to stand."

He took out a bunch of keys, a computing resource authorization card, and a two-page space handover form from the document bag.

The specially approved plan by the school yesterday afternoon had fully taken effect.

The equipment of the original supporting unit continued to be retained for use, the surrounding office space was entirely incorporated into the center's preparation arrangements, the fifteen full-time positions were smoothly integrated into the personnel system, and the first three-year research funding of sixty million yuan had also established an exclusive independent project account.

Professor Zhou Wendao pushed that bunch of keys to the exact middle of the desk, making a crisp collision sound.

"The offices and discussion rooms can be handed over today, and computing resources will be officially opened this afternoon. As for the lecture hall, the venue originally reserved for you by the school has 320 seats."

Gu Mingche lowered his head and glanced at the two cardboard boxes by the door that were continuously filling up.

"320 seats? That might only be enough to seat the applicants' family members."

The administrative assistant was holding a stack of newly printed visiting plans, and upon hearing this, lifted his head and looked at him seriously: "Our current logistics support is not yet responsible for family arrangements."

"Then those heavyweight applicants can only be wronged and stand to listen to the presentation," Gu Mingche shrugged.

Jiang Lin pulled out that report abstract from the folder and handed it to Professor Zhou Wendao.

The abstract was only a single page, and the very first line of the main text threw out a heavyweight conclusion.

Planar point sets will be constructed on infinitely many scales so that the number of unit distances satisfies a superlinear lower bound with a fixed positive exponent.

Following closely behind were a series of highly oppressive core mathematical concepts.

High-degree CM fields, Minkowski full-embedding windows, controlled root discriminants, class field towers, completely splitting prime numbers, and finally planar projection and duplicate point liquidation.

"We can squeeze into the office side for a couple of days first," Jiang Lin's voice was crisp and decisive, "but the lecture hall still needs to be borrowed a bit larger."

Professor Zhou Wendao took the thin abstract and directly dialed the dedicated line for campus scheduling.

This phone call lasted for a full seventeen minutes, during which three different contacts were switched due to permission and scheduling issues.

In the end, the event originally scheduled to use the largest lecture hall in the morning made concessions and was adjusted to the afternoon, and the center successfully secured the complete time slot from 7:00 AM to 12:30 PM on the morning of November 29th.

The academic secretary quickly changed the original room number on the electronic schedule.

The technical liaison switched out to a new backend, created a new main page for the public report, and temporarily titled it "A Superlinear Lower Bound for Planar Unit Distance Problems".

However, when filling in the speaker identity column on the page, the words in the input box appeared too crowded and automatically switched to two lines.

[2022 Undergraduate Student of Qiuzhen College, Tsinghua University]

[Academic Head and Chief Researcher of the Jiang Lin Interdisciplinary Research Center (Preparatory), Tsinghua University]

The academic secretary turned the monitor screen around and asked: "Should the undergraduate item be placed in front, or should the center position be placed in front to look more formal?"

"Arrange them in chronological order." Jiang Lin glanced at the layout of the preview page, "I am first a student of Qiuzhen College, and only yesterday did I become the head of the center."

"But when the publicity department releases it externally, they will most likely put the first line into the main title as a gimmick."

"The second line is equally a fact." Jiang Lin's gaze fell on the screen, "Keep both lines; in order to save a line of text, it becomes easier to make things unclear when explaining to the outside world."

At 9:23 AM, the first version of the targeted invitation email after the establishment of the center was officially sent from the server of the preparation office.

The recipient list had been carefully considered, including the seven international researchers who participated in the public verification, peers who had raised substantive questions during the preprint stage, major teams in the fields of domestic discrete geometry and number theory, and major research institutions that clearly inquired about the first academic event at the very first moment after the center's preparation announcement was released.

The invitation letter attached a detailed report abstract, access links to public code and materials, time and location, and sincerely wrote in the last line——

Please bring your sharpest questions into the venue.

The first confirmation letter was replied to almost in seconds, coming from Budapest.

The replying professor stated that he would lead the entire research group to participate online for the whole process, and directly submitted two in-depth questions in the email prepared for questioning after the report.

The second confirmation letter came from Bonn.

A researcher participating in the independent reconstruction replied briefly that he had forcibly moved the group meeting originally scheduled for the same time to next week.

The third reply was even more straightforward, with only one concise sentence throughout the entire piece.

[ I will come to Beijing. ]

The technical liaison quickly registered that letter into the VIP seating list at the venue, and casually clicked open the other party's attached itinerary information attachment.

The plane tickets had been booked, and the arrival time in Beijing was the afternoon of November 28th.

The internal telephone by the door was still ringing tirelessly.

The administrative assistant carefully stuffed the newly printed eleven heavyweight materials into the cardboard box, and the height of the papers quickly exceeded the edge of the box, piling up into a small hill.

Near noon, Jiang Lin, Gu Mingche, and the technical liaison took time out to visit the lecture hall site.

The huge venue was empty and solemn.

The staff of the lecture hall were slowly pushing the mobile blackboard in from the side door, and then added another one according to Jiang Lin's request, fixing two blackboards side by side below the central main screen.

Gu Mingche walked alone to the last row of the lecture hall, raised his mobile phone, and photographed the test formula temporarily written on the blackboard.

He used two fingers to zoom in on the screen, carefully confirming that the lens could still clearly distinguish the polynomial exponents and tiny subscripts at the maximum focal length.

The technical liaison logged into the backend system on the control console and opened the report page.

The main screen instantly lit up, and the dark blue preview background cast a somewhat solemn glow over the entire lecture hall.

Host: Jiang Lin Interdisciplinary Research Center (Preparatory), Tsinghua University

Speaker: Jiang Lin

The staff member stared at the upper and lower lines of words on the screen, hands pausing on the keyboard, and looked back to confirm: "The center name is too long, do we need to use an abbreviation?"

"Use the full name," Jiang Lin stood in front of the podium, gazing at the huge screen and saying, "This screen is big enough; it can fit here."

The staff member nodded and pressed the save button.

The large screen refresh was complete.

The identity information of the host and speaker was arranged vertically.