97: Chapter 97 Promoting it to the World

From May 6 to May 12.

Many teachers and students at the School of Mathematics of Jiangda University discovered that the discussion room labeled C216 on the second floor of Building C had been acting a bit strange lately.

Usually, this place was just for graduate students to hold reading classes, professors to hold group meetings, or small research groups to brainstorm.

Its normal state was loose, filled with the smell of coffee, and even carried a bit of the cozy ease of academic slacking off.

But recently, its door was frequently closed.

The whiteboard went from a few scattered calculus formulas originally to densely packed geometric structural diagrams.

That old HP network printer had almost fallen into a berserk state, continuously spitting out and swallowing A4 paper.

Chen Yan, as the most reliable direct Ph.D. student under Professor Gu Nanzhou, became the first load-bearing bearing on this high-speed running machine.

Every day, hugging stack after stack of materials radiating heat and a pungent ink smell, he scurried back and forth between the office of his advisor, the large server room, and the C216 discussion room.

On the first day, his expression was excited.

On the second day, it was solemn.

By the fourth day, the expression on his face had degenerated into numbness in the physical sense.

Sometimes, passing fellow graduate students, looking at his dark circles and disheveled hair, could not help holding him back and asking: "Senior Brother Chen, what big project is your group working on lately, how come you are running round-the-clock like this?"

At first, Chen Yan would still twitch the corners of his stiff mouth, and perfunctorily reply according to the instructions of Professor Gu: "Helping other departments organize some interdisciplinary materials and run some data."

Later, when severe sleep deprivation caused his prefrontal cortex to begin striking, he was too lazy to even perfunctorily reply.

"Mopping the floor."

One day, hugging five hundred pages of newly printed log files, he answered with a blank stare.

The other person was stunned, looked at the files in the hands of Chen Yan, and then at the mirror-bright tiles of the corridor: "What, is Professor Gu starting to exploit Ph.D. students to do cleaning now?"

Chen Yan stared expressionlessly at the splicing gaps of the floor tiles, his voice lingering like a wandering ghost: "Mopping the floor in a mathematical sense."

That person understood even less.

Chen Yan did not plan to explain either.

Because he himself was almost driven crazy by that floor existing in a high-dimensional logical space.

The so-called computer-aided verification package of Tile J, after officially entering the multi-node parallel re-run stage, allowed Chen Yan to truly understand what the phrase that this is manual labor meant through his dual physical and mental collapse.

Before this, Chen Yan was responsible for printing and organizing paper proofs.

Those manuscripts filled with complex local patch definitions, group action classifications, and hierarchical recursive derivations, although hard to understand, at least retained the romance of classical mathematics.

When reading those manuscripts, Chen Yan could still feel a sublime illusion of "I am approaching the truth of the universe, I am gazing at the jigsaw puzzle of God."

There was an intellectual sense of pleasure.

However, the running of the verification package was entirely a different matter.

It did not shine with the light of human wisdom like proofs; it was more like an emotionless interstellar warehouse inventory system.

In the process of proving a non-periodic monotile, local forcing rules would generate a massive number of boundary matching situations.

To prove that no situation could lead to periodic translation, the machine had to traverse all local states.

One class of states generated, evaluated, cut into the next class of states, and then expanded to the neighborhood of the next class of states.

Merge isomorphic equivalence classes, assigning an absolutely unique hash number to each graph.

Detect closed loops, mark them as dead ends, and record the reasons for topological contradictions.

Output JSON files that easily reached hundreds of megabytes or several gigabytes, calculate polynomial hash values, and generate traceability logs.

Then: error, troubleshoot, modify script, re-run; error again, re-run again.

The verification package handed in by Jiang Lin, called MPS, did not have a flashy code style.

There were no showy graphical interfaces that big-tech programmers liked to make, no intricate external dependency libraries that took half a day to install the environment for, and no engineering garbage that looked like it applied all kinds of advanced design patterns but actually could not run on another computer just because the underlying C++ compiler version was different.

The structure of the entire folder carried a minimalist ruthlessness.

When Chen Yan first decompressed this package on the intranet server of the School of Mathematics at Jiangda University, he actually breathed a sigh of relief in his heart.

As a Ph.D. student who often helped his advisor run all kinds of ancestral code full of messy legacies, he had seen too many appalling scripts.

The package in front of him had clear directories, standardized naming, and looked quite clean.

Then, he typed python3 generate_states.py and started running it.

In the first round, the top-configuration Linux workstation in the Jiangda office, loaded with dual Xeon processors and 128G of memory, roared for four hours, and when the progress bar reached 57 percent, suddenly, after a crisp beep, ruthlessly threw out a large section of red error messages.

The heart of Chen Yan leaped to his throat.

If the mathematical model was wrong, it meant that the carnival of the past few days was just a bubble.

He leaned closer to the screen, stared at the error message for over ten seconds, and suddenly had an urge to laugh yet smash the keyboard.

It was not a proof error.

It was not a logic error.

It was not a memory overflow.

It was a file read/write error.

And the reason was absurd to the extreme.

The workstation had been borrowed by a teacher from another department before, and a temporary path in the system environment variables contained a full-width Chinese username.

And the script of Jiang Lin, when calling low-level system-level relative path concatenation, did not consider the forced transcoding of non-ASCII characters, causing a UnicodeEncodeError to be thrown when writing to the temporary log.

A century-level verification package that was extremely likely to completely solve the monotile problem that had plagued the human mathematical community for sixty years—its sharpest first slash actually landed on the encoding of a Chinese path.

Chen Yan took a deep breath, took a screenshot of the problem, attached the environment logs, and sent it to Jiang Lin.

Just ten minutes later, Jiang Lin sent back the updated code patch.

He rewrote the path processing module, added a mandatory UTF-8 encoding declaration and an exception handling mechanism, clean and neat.

Second round, restart.

After a long six hours, it ran through successfully.

Green text popped up on the screen: "Verification Complete. All local cases matched expected signatures."

Chen Yan let out a long sigh of relief, just preparing to stand up and pour a glass of water to celebrate.

At the bottom right corner of the computer, the email client popped up a notification sound.

It was an email sent by Professor Lin Zhaoye far away at Nanjing University.

The School of Mathematics of Nanjing University specifically cleared out a high-performance cluster node dedicated to algebraic topology calculations to cooperate with this re-verification.

However, the Python version on that machine was a slightly older version 3.8, and the version of the underlying NumPy scientific computing library called was also different.

When processing the vertex coordinates of Tile J, the floating-point format in the output table had an extra tiny error.

The result itself was completely consistent in a topological sense and did not affect the conclusion.

However, the diff script used for automated comparison lit up a red light.

The text did not match.

In the email, Professor Lin Zhaoye did not hold back just because this was a high school student; between the lines oozed the rigor and harshness of an old-school scholar, writing only a very heavy sentence: "Reproducibility instructions cannot assume that peers worldwide are all using the same model of machine and the same version of compiler as you; this is the universal principle of science."

Chen Yan looked at the email and broke out in a cold sweat for Jiang Lin.

This kind of fault-finding accusation, for a young person who had just made a huge contribution, could easily trigger a rebellious psychology.

But the reply of Jiang Lin arrived two minutes later.

"Received. Problem confirmed. All underlying geometric coordinate comparison modules have been completely changed from floating-point approximate comparison to precise encoding based on algebraic integers, and output using rational number formats. New version v0.3 has been uploaded."

In the third round, over at the research institute of Shao Mingtang in Beijing, they started running the key samples used to generate the paper appendix graphs.

Running to the seventh hour, another fatal format specification problem was discovered.

When processing the flipped reading of Tile J, two test samples that should have belonged to the same equivalence class had inconsistent names output in the log.

One was generated according to the first traversal algorithm, called "mirror_case_B3".

Another was generated according to reverse backtracking, called "reflected_B3".

As researchers, when the human brain saw these two words, it could instantly react that they referred to the same topological structure mathematically.

But the machine did not know.

For the hashing algorithm, these were two completely different strings of characters.

If future reviewers—those extremely picky mathematicians likely from Princeton, Cambridge, or the Institute for Advanced Study—came with a magnifying glass to review your verification code, they would never generously guess the connection for you out of mercy.

They would only coldly write a sentence: "The code logic has ambiguities, and the state space classification is not rigorous."

Thus, Jiang Lin modified it again.

He unified the global namespace and introduced strictly standardized naming functions.

In the following days, the most spoken words in the C216 discussion room were not genius, not breakthrough, not monotile.

Floating in the air were all extremely dry engineering commands.

"Re-run! Jiangda node machine number two reallocates memory."

"Where is the log? Why is the derivative log of state number 4470 broken?"

"Version numbers are not aligned! Are you running v0.4 or v0.4.1 right now?"

"Wait a minute, which figure in the draft does this output result correspond to? Has the figure index file been updated?"

"The terminal output of R-44 does not match the appendix number; it is off by one displacement vector."

"Do not modify the original file directly! Open a new version branch; we must retain a complete traceability chain of modifications."

"Jiang Lin, your new README is written like a martial arts manual that only you can understand. You should assume your reader is an idiot who only knows how to press the Enter key."

At first, Chen Yan felt incomparably miserable.

He felt like a piece-rate worker tightening screws on an assembly line, and moreover, tightening screws that could explode at any time.

Later, in the high-intensity mechanical repetition, he gradually became numb, turning into an emotionless code-running machine.

However, even later, when the version number advanced to v0.7, Chen Yan stared at the flashing terminal cursor alone in the dead of night, and deep down, a trace of deep fear unexpectedly arose amidst this dryness.

Because Jiang Lin changed things too fast.

It was not the kind of fast where a student gets scolded by the teacher, breaks out in a sweat, and rushes to patch things up haphazardly.

That was a spine-chilling, seemingly condescending "proficiency."

Instead, when you pointed out a problem, he quickly switched to the corresponding position as if he had known that problem would appear long ago, changed it, patched the log, upgraded the version, re-ran it, and gave the difference explanation.

One time, one time, Chen Yan could not help asking: "Did you write these in advance?"

Jiang Lin was modifying README_reproduce.md and replied without even lifting his head.

"Written something similar."

"When?" Chen Yan pursued.

He found it hard to believe that a high school student could out of thin air possess the architecture capability and crisis handling experience of such a large-scale engineering project.

Because this required time-fed moves and the beatings of countless projects.

But Jiang Lin calmly threw out two words.

"Before."

Chen Yan looked at him.

This "before" left him completely unable to respond.

On the night of May 9, the full re-run of the local case table was declared complete for the first time on that extremely optimized Linux machine at Jiangda.

The terminal showed: Total running time: 8 hours 17 minutes 42 seconds.

All equivalence class merges were correct, and the final state count completely matched the paper-based theoretical calculation.

On May 10, the cluster server at Nanjing University far away in Nanjing finished its re-run.

After overcoming the floating-point numbers and environmental differences, the machine gave a final judgment with consistent results.

On May 11, over at the research institute of Shao Mingtang, not only did they finish running the key samples, but they even mobilized the idle nodes of the supercomputing center to run the related expansion scripts aimed at ruling out the possibility of periodic bands.

The results were consistent.

On May 12, Jiang Lin packaged all the generated logs, hash verification codes, and the code base itself.

He opened LaTeX and compiled it to generate the final document.

MPS_verification_report_v0.8.pdf.

Finite-State Verification Report on the Local Configuration Table of Tile J.

May 13, 9:00 AM.

A drizzle drifted over Jiangcheng, and the C216 discussion room held another full closed-door meeting.

This time, the materials on the long conference table had changed from the initial stack of rough draft paper into three neat stacks of heavyweight documents.

The first stack was the finalized paper proof after line-by-line scrutiny and rigorous reconstruction.

The second stack was the two-hundred-page computer-assisted verification report, exuding the unique electrostatic smell of the computer room.

The third stack was the summary of all revision suggestions, rejection records, and bug tracking over the past few days.

Professor Gu Nanzhou projected the latest version of the internal records onto the screen.

Tile J Internal Review Records

Status: Ready to submit preprint draft.

There are three items below.

1. The main chain of paper proof has completed the first round of internal line-by-line review.

2. The local configuration table has completed MPS-assisted verification, and the multi-machine rerun results are consistent.

3. The internal review system has concluded.

Professor Lu Zhixing closed his notebook: "There are no flaws whatsoever in the process. I believe we can enter the preparation stage for the preprint."

Professor Gu Nanzhou nodded gently: "Since the core academic work has been established, this afternoon's work will be to organize the title page and acknowledgments of the paper."

As soon as these words were spoken, the room, which still retained a trace of the residual warmth of discussion, suddenly fell completely silent.

Even Chen Yan stopped typing on his keyboard and subconsciously held his breath.

Because everyone knew in their hearts that what was going to be brought to the table next was no longer objective mathematics.

Rather, it was subjective authorship rights concerning human nature, reputation, and interests.

2:00 PM.

The large whiteboard in C216 was wiped clean by Chen Yan.

Professor Gu Nanzhou picked up the black whiteboard marker and solemnly wrote an English word at the top: Authors.

Then, he put down the pen, turned around, and looked at Jiang Lin sitting at the other end of the table.

"Jiang Lin, you are the absolute core initiator of this paper." Professor Gu Nanzhou's voice was gentle yet full of strength: "Regarding authorship, tell us your thoughts first."

Jiang Lin seemed to have been prepared for a long time, calmly taking out a folded A4 piece of paper from his pocket and pushing it to the center of the table.

On it, written neatly with a black gel pen, was an author order arranged alphabetically by initials.

Professor Gu Nanzhou only glanced down, and as soon as he saw his own name prominently listed there, his usually gentle and refined brows immediately furrowed tightly, as if he had seen something extremely counter-intuitive.

Professor Lin Zhaoye, connected via video conference on the screen, leaned closer to the camera to take a glance, and his expression changed instantly; his body, which had been leaning against the back of the chair, suddenly sat up straight.

Shao Mingtang, who was in Beijing, had the most straightforward personality. After clearly seeing the list on the paper, she didn't give Jiang Lin a chance to explain at all, and directly said with a resonant voice through the microphone: "Nonsense, delete my name immediately."

"Delete mine too." Professor Lin Zhaoye followed closely behind, his tone as stern as if he were reprimanding an undergraduate student who had made a low-level mistake.

"Mine is the same." Professor Lu Zhixing pushed his glasses, his tone leaving no room for negotiation.

Jiang Lin looked at the professors who reacted intensely, straightened his body slightly, and crossed his hands on the table.

"Professor Gu helped me disassemble the verification task from a macro perspective, formulated a standardized multi-line parallel process, and provided the best server resources of Jiangda University. Professor Lu stayed awake for days and nights, helping me monitor the topological evidence chain of every step and translating my draft into academic language conforming to top journal standards. Professor Lin and Shao Mingtang canceled their original itineraries, helping me review the proof logic line by line, and guarding the physical meaning of the half-period strip and alternative system."

Jiang Lin's tone was very steady, without deliberate sensationalism, but every word was very serious.

"This paper, this work, over the past half month or so, has no longer belonged to me alone. If only my name is signed, I think it's unfair."

He was speaking absolute truth from his heart.

In the Wasteland, he had groped alone in the dark jungle of this problem for decades.

He knew better than anyone else in this world how lucky and rare it was to have achievements verified by a group of the most professional and harsh people who were willing to pick faults line by line for him and provide him with strong computing power support.

It was these teachers who used their experience and rigor to help him complete the final transition from a personal fancy to human truth.

But as soon as his voice fell, Professor Lin Zhaoye waved his hand forcefully on the other side of the screen, interrupting him.

"Jiang Lin, listen up." Professor Lin Zhaoye stared into the camera, his gaze like torches: "This paper, from the most core geometric construction (Tile J) to the breakthrough proof route, and then to that extremely complete verification program. Every single creative breakthrough from zero to one that truly supports the skeleton of this paper was conceived and written by you alone."

"What did the few of us do? We just looked at your draft, asked a few tricky questions, and used our meager authority at hand to dispatch a few faster machines to help you run them. These things belong to verification, not creation. Swap any peer with mathematical common sense and understanding of code, given enough time, they could all do it."

Professor Lin Zhaoye looked at him, word by word, resonant and powerful.

"But that non-periodic tile that can induce local forcing, apart from you, no brain in the world can currently conceive of it."

"Jiang Lin, I know you're a good kid. But you must understand that academic authorship is not a cake for distributing the fruits of victory." Professor Lin Zhaoye increased his tone: "It's not that whoever handed a brick nearby, put in some effort, or stayed up a few nights should brazenly put their name on it. Authorship means that you enjoy honor for the core intellectual contribution of this paper and bear unshirkable responsibility."

Shao Mingtang also picked up the conversation on that end, her voice carrying a sense of aloofness and open-mindedness unique to the older generation of intellectuals.

"Professor Lin is right; we don't have the qualifications to shoulder the weight of this contribution."

"We old fellows, half a month ago, were still condescendingly telling you that this level of verification would take at least several months. And the result? You took less than three days to put all the paper proofs in front of us."

Shao Mingtang looked at the excessively young teenager on the screen and couldn't help smiling.

In that smile, there was gratification toward a genius, as well as the relief and openness of someone who had been struggling in the academic world for decades.

"Just based on this point, how could we, your so-called academic seniors and professors, have the face to put our names ahead of you, the one who truly pushed open the door to truth? Even hanging it at the back, we would feel it burning our hands."

"This paper is destined to enter the history of mathematics. If we really brazenly sign our names on it, ten years later, when future generations open the history of mathematics and see, oh, on the masterpiece of the century solving Einstein's single tile problem, besides the genius Jiang Lin who truly proposed the construction, the author column also hangs a few professors who relied on helping to run machines and modifying formats."

Professor Lin Zhaoye sneered and added an extremely sharp sentence.

"That's not gilding the faces of us old fellows; that's smearing our lifelong academic reputations. That's making peers all over the world laugh at us for bullying the weak with our status, greedily taking credit for heaven's work, and snatching the painstaking efforts of a high school student."

Professor Lin Zhaoye's words were extremely heavy, almost brutally tearing open the unspoken rules and bottom lines of the academic world and placing them on the table.

Jiang Lin looked at them, his lips moving slightly, wanting to say something more.

"Alright, stop arguing."

The one who spoke this time was Professor Gu Nanzhou, who had been silent all along.

"Jiang Lin, if you really want to express your gratitude for our staying up late these past few days, it's very simple: at the end of the article, list us in the acknowledgments. Write a sentence thanking so-and-so for their help in verification and discussion, and that's enough."

Professor Gu Nanzhou looked into Jiang Lin's eyes and said very seriously:

"This is what we deserve, and it's also all we deserve."

"As for the author column, this paper, which is enough to go down in history, can only and must only bear your name alone. This is the law of history and respect for the truth itself."

Professor Lin Zhaoye nodded on the screen: "I will accept acknowledgments at most, and they must be ranked at the very end."

Shao Mingtang without hesitation: "Me too."

Professor Lu Zhixing pushed his glasses and said only two words: "Seconded."

Chen Yan, who had been sitting in the corner taking meeting minutes and had been like an invisible person all along without speaking,

watching several academic tycoons who were usually high and mighty declining an authorship right sufficient to win global mathematics awards as if dodging a plague, suddenly raised his hand weakly and asked in a low voice:

"Um, bosses, what about me?"

The gazes of the whole audience instantly focused on Chen Yan.

Professor Lin Zhaoye looked him up and down on the screen, his tone returning to the appearance of reprimanding graduate students usually: "What did you do? These past few days, you were mainly responsible for printing materials, fetching takeout, pouring coffee, tidying the wastebasket, running a few one-click generation scripts, plus recording dozens of low-level bugs."

Chen Yan touched his nose awkwardly and nodded like a chick pecking at rice: "Yes, yes, so what I mean is..."

"So your name can be in the acknowledgments."

"That's good, that's good." Chen Yan patted his chest exaggeratedly, let out a long sigh of relief, and the whole person seemed to have unloaded a heavy burden of a thousand catties.

Professor Gu Nanzhou looked at this good-for-nothing look of his proud student, couldn't help frowning at him: "No, they declined authorship to avoid suspicion, and you're just an odd-job helper, what are you sighing in relief for here?"

Chen Yan was very honest, looking at Professor Gu with a sincerity driven by survival instinct.

"Boss, you guys are big shots and aren't afraid of questioning. I'm just a wretched Ph.D. student, and I'm afraid that to take care of me, you'll forcefully hang my name on the second or third author spot. Once it's hung up, after this paper is published, math big shots all over the world will chase after me with emails asking, Dr. Chen, may I ask which homology group mapping logic you used when proving the topological invariant of half-period strip exclusion? But I didn't prove any step at all; I'm afraid I'll be socially dead on the spot when asked by peers at international conferences by then."

"Hahaha..." Hearing Chen Yan's highly realistic confession, Professor Lin Zhaoye couldn't help laughing and scolding on the other side of the screen: "You brat are still quite sober; your head hasn't been turned by greed."

In this small C216 discussion room, on this Jiangcheng afternoon shrouded in drizzle.

Several scholar-professors who had immersed themselves in this profound algebra and geometry field for most of their lives, and could have easily grabbed a slice of the pie in this century-level achievement with their own status and resources,

so calmly, even somewhat stubbornly, with a bit of academic cleanliness, pushed an authorship right sufficient to allow any scientific researcher to be recorded in the history of human science completely back to an eighteen-year-old teenager.

Jiang Lin did not insist any further, but picked up the pen again and solemnly wrote a paragraph.

"Thanks to Professor Lin Zhaoye, Shao Mingtang, Professor Gu Nanzhou, Professor Lu Zhixing, and Dr. Chen Yan for their selfless help in the early verification, logical review, and algorithm discussion of this work."

After finishing writing, he held up the paper and aimed it at the camera.

Professor Lin Zhaoye looked at those words and smiled with satisfaction.

"That's right."

"Remember, not a single word is allowed to be written more." Shao Mingtang added over there, her tone carrying the admonition of a strict teacher: "Especially do not add polite bullshit like under the meticulous guidance of Professor So-and-So in the front. We didn't guide you; not only did we not guide you, but on this issue, it was you who gave us old fellows a solid lesson."

The next half hour was the final decision on the paper's title.

Jiang Lin's original Chinese initial draft title was very straightforward, carrying a kind of crude nature typical of science and engineering boys.

"A Non-Periodic Monotile Construction and Proof Forced by Local Boundaries"

The English title, several people were writing and drawing on the whiteboard, discussing it for a full half hour from the two dimensions of mathematical precision and widespread dissemination.

Finally, after much deliberation, the final English title was tentatively decided:

"An Aperiodic Monotile via Local Forcing"

Professor Lin Zhaoye looked at the line of words on the screen and rubbed his chin: "It's a bit longer than 'An aperiodic monotile', but it explains the route clearly."

Professor Gu Nanzhou made the final decision: "Let's use this for now. The preprint title just needs to be accurate. When we officially submit it to a journal later, we can make minor adjustments based on the review editor's comments."

Jiang Lin had no objections to this.

A name was just a code name, and that tile was the actual entity.

May 15th, 11:42 PM.

By this time, Jiangcheng had long since entered the tranquility of late night.

The evening self-study sessions of major high schools had ended long ago, and the boarding students had all turned off the lights and gone to bed.

However, on the second floor of Building C of the Jiangda University School of Mathematics, the C216 discussion room was still brightly lit as if it were daytime.

On the table, all the debris had been cleared away.

Right in the center lay the complete final draft taken from the printer.

From the extremely rigorous analytical definition of the single tile (Tile J) on the first page, to the standard classification atlas of the four major block categories under matrix mapping on the third page.

To the "Synthesis Uniqueness Lemma" derived based on group theory on the fifth page, and the topological proof completely ruling out the possibility of semi-periodic bands using boundary energy constraints on the twelfth page.

To the grand finale, the derived main theorem.

And attached to the end of the article, the excruciatingly detailed computer-aided verification code logic description and hash report.

This was a logically rigorous and closed paper.

In any corner of this earth, any unfamiliar peer with the relevant knowledge base, as long as they downloaded this paper, could follow Jiang Lin's train of thought, review it all the way from the first line of code on the first page to the last page, and arrive at a unique and inevitable conclusion.

The submission page of the preprint website arXiv was already open.

Regarding the article classification, under Professor Gu Nanzhou's suggestion, Jiang Lin checked math.CO, which was the most traditional home for tiling and tessellation problems.

Professor Lin Zhaoye hesitated for a moment and asked him to add math.DS as a cross-classification to accommodate substitution systems and periodic band arguments.

Professor Gu Nanzhou had originally considered math.MG, but didn't choose it in the end because the focus of this manuscript was not metric geometry, but combinatorial construction and hierarchical forcing.

At this moment, Jiang Lin was sitting in the chair directly in front of the computer.

Professor Gu Nanzhou stood behind him on the left with his arms crossed and a solemn expression.

Professor Lu Zhixing sat on the sofa nearby, leaning forward and staring intently at the screen.

Professor Lin Zhaoye and Shao Mingtang quietly watched this scene on two monitors through high-definition video conferencing software.

As for Chen Yan, his eyes were already bloodshot from staying up. Like a coding dog who had been writing underlying code for three consecutive days and nights, he was huddled in the corner holding a thermos cup printed with the centennial anniversary of Jiangda University.

The page scrolled down to the author information column.

Only a single name stood alone in the author column.

Jiang Lin

And in the immediately following affiliation column, in the afternoon, the few people had another short and fierce discussion.

Finally, a line of English with a strong magical realism color was filled in.

Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, Jiangcheng, China

During the discussion, out of good intentions, Professor Gu Nanzhou had originally proposed that considering the high school student identity might be mistakenly killed by the amateur scientist filtering mechanism during the preprint preliminary review stage, the Jiangda University School of Mathematics could be used as a communication assistance unit for endorsement.

But Professor Lin Zhaoye on the other end didn't hesitate for a second and directly vetoed it.

"No. Academia dislikes nothing more than a title that isn't justified and words that aren't proper; affiliations must never be hung casually. Jiang Lin is still a middle school student and hasn't gone through any admission procedures. Not a single day has he stepped through the gates of Jiangda University, so he cannot be considered a person from the Jiangda University School of Mathematics."

Professor Lu Zhixing also nodded in agreement immediately: "I agree with Professor Lin. Jiangcheng No. 7 High School is Jiangcheng No. 7 High School. A high school student has produced world-class mathematical achievements, what is there to cover up? Facts are facts. The more it is about such a major event that shakes the entire academic world, the cleaner and more transparent his identity and background must be. We cannot leave future skeptics with even a shred of an excuse that an academic institution ghostwrote and hyped it behind the scenes."

To solve the communication and contact problems, Professor Gu Nanzhou used his authority to help Jiang Lin apply for a temporary exclusive academic contact email address.

In the end, the submission account used Professor Gu Nanzhou's arXiv account for proxy submission.

The author information, affiliation, and copyright notice still all pointed to Jiang Lin himself.

Professor Gu Nanzhou only acted as the submission proxy and communication assistant, and did not enter the author column.

"There are no problems."

Professor Gu Nanzhou leaned over and checked the abstract, PDF attachment, LaTeX source file package, and classification tags extremely carefully.

He straightened his body and took a deep breath.

"Jiang Lin, submit it."

Jiang Lin held the mouse in his right hand.

The arrow of the cursor was now resting steadily on the blue button that read [Submit].

Chen Yan held his breath in the corner.

The gazes of several professors were also focused on that small arrow.

But in Jiang Lin's heart, there were actually no particularly intense emotional fluctuations.

There was no surge of hot-bloodedness played in film and television dramas after going through all hardships to finally obtain the true scriptures.

There was no turbulence and ecstasy of soon achieving success, fame, and leaving a name in history.

He didn't even have half a point of accelerated heartbeat and nervousness.

To him, everything was too long.

This single tile called Tile J had only been born for half a month in the real timeline.

But deep within his soul, decades ago, he had already pieced together, verified, overturned, and rebuilt this tile back and forth in his mind countless times.

To the human world, this was a world-shaking brand-new discovery.

But to Jiang Lin himself, this was just an old matter that had been completely accomplished in another spacetime long ago.

Tonight's submission was nothing more than putting the final legality seal on this creation belonging to the past in this vibrant Real World after returning from that lonely Wasteland.

He looked at the screen and pressed it gently, as naturally as turning on the switch of a home appliance.

"Click."

The page instantly began to jump, and the browser's progress bar flashed past rapidly.

A green prompt box popped out, displaying two lines of concise English on it.

Submission Status: Submitted.

Pending moderation.

Below these two lines of text was an Eastern Time stamp accurate to the second.

This paper titled "An Aperiodic Monotile via Local Forcing" was randomly assigned a system number composed of numbers and letters in the underlying logic of the server.

It officially entered arXiv's huge and cold review queue.

If all went well, after preliminary machine screening by automated scripts and category administrators, it would appear in the globally synchronized update list in the early morning of that day on the arXiv.org website in the batch released by the next system.

It would be densely lined up with hundreds of papers uploaded by all famous or unknown mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists from all over the world on that day.

In this frontier position full of exaggerated titles and complex formulas, it looked completely unremarkable.

In the C216 discussion room, there was no deafening cheer as seen in film and television dramas, nor did anyone pop champagne to celebrate.

Because in this level of academic circle, everyone knew very well that submission was never the end point.

It was simply putting a challenge open and above board in front of all the top and most demanding brains in the world, accepting their inspection and dissection with microscopes.

But even so, when seeing the word Submitted, everyone in the room let out a long sigh of relief simultaneously.

On the other end of the screen, Shao Mingtang took off her anti-blue light glasses, rubbed the corners of her eyes, and sighed softly: "This tile that has trapped all human intelligence in a dead end for as long as sixty years has finally flown from this small discussion room into the entire vast and boundless academic world."

Professor Lu Zhixing, sitting on the sofa, opened his inseparable notebook, picked up a pen, and wrote the last line of archive records on the new page.

[May 15, 2022 23:4J Preprint officially submitted via the network. Author: Jiang Lin. Status: Pending review, archive temporarily sealed.]

Chen Yan, who had been huddled in the corner all along, leaned limply against the back of the chair at this moment.

Looking at the glare of the incandescent light tubes on the ceiling, he suddenly asked a question in a low voice imbued with a bit of fantasy and a bit of awe.

"If all goes well, after passing the automated checks and the preliminary review by the category administrator, it will appear on the update list of some upcoming workday. Bosses, what do you say, what will it become?"

The room was quiet for a few seconds.

No one answered this huge question immediately.

After a while, Professor Lin Zhaoye picked up his teacup in the video, blew on the floating tea leaves, and stated the future trajectory in a plain tone accustomed to major storms.

"What else could happen? First, it will be quiet for a while. Because the vast majority of people who see the title will only take it as the crazy talk of another amateur scientist who has gone mad wanting fame."

"But soon, someone will click to download that PDF out of curiosity or boredom. Then, they will see those geometric derivations inside."

"Someone will start to frown."

"Someone will find this construction that breaks periodicity relying solely on local forcing to be extremely absurd and contrary to physical intuition."

"Someone will immediately open their computer and try to use their most adept algorithm to find the logical loopholes in the local state table in the paper."

Shao Mingtang followed Professor Lin Zhaoye's words and smiled.

"The problem is, they won't find any loopholes. When they run the highest-configuration computers for three days and nights and find that damn verification report is impregnable, Chen Yan, what do you guess will happen?"

Chen Yan shook his head blankly.

"Like sharks smelling blood, more people will come."

Professor Gu Nanzhou looked at Jiang Lin's back, took over the conversation, and said in a deep tone,

"People from Princeton will come, people from Cambridge will come, and people from Oxford and ENS will all rush over like crazy. They will try to pick out even a single punctuation error in this proof. If they can't find any, they will be forced to admit that this piece of history has turned the page."

Professor Gu Nanzhou walked to Jiang Lin's side and patted the young man's slightly thin shoulder: "Jiang Lin, next, that will be a collective review of this proof by top peers. You must mentally prepare yourself."

"Mm." Jiang Lin nodded.

"All right, stop building up the atmosphere here." Professor Lu Zhixing slammed his notebook shut and stood up, "Since things have already been submitted, the only thing our gang can do in a physical sense right now is to go back to sleep immediately. My heart has been protesting for a long time."

Professor Gu Nanzhou also glanced at his watch and chuckled: "Old Lu is right. Sleeping is currently the highest priority task."