Chapter 1379: Five Hundred Pages of Proof

Early morning…

A car parked downstairs at the mathematics department at Jin University.

Han Mengqi thanked the driver who helped her take the suitcase out of the trunk. She then dragged the suitcase and went upstairs. However, when she was about to open the door and walk into the office, she was caught by a hand that came out from the side.

“Li Mo?”

Han Mengqi looked at the younger guy and spoke.

“What’s wrong?”

Li Mo glanced at the office door and spoke with a serious face.

“Master has been in a retreat for two days, let’s not disturb him.”

“Two days?!” Han Mengqi was shocked. Her eyes widened, and she asked, “H-he stayed in the office for two days? What about food? He didn’t come out to eat?”

“He still ate.” Ji Mo said embarrassedly, “I went to the cafeteria to bring him back food… I just brought his breakfast over. I was planning to go to the library to study… Do you want to go together?”

“Oh, as long as he’s eating…” Han Mengqi breathed a sigh of relief and suddenly said, “By the way, did he say you can call him Master?”

Li Mo: “…?”

Han Mengqi realized that her reaction was a little sudden. She coughed and explained, “I mean, this is a school and you are still in undergraduate studies. It is not good for other students to hear you call him that.”

Li Mo realized that this seemed to make sense. He scratched his head in embarrassment and admitted his mistake, “Ah… I’m sorry, I didn’t think about it.”

Seeing this junior disciple acknowledging his mistake and correcting it, Han Mengqi nodded in satisfaction.

“As long as you don’t do it again…”

She put her right hand on the doorknob of the office, opened the door carefully, and walked in.

Han Mengqi closed the office door and looked at Lu Zhou’s eyebags. She quietly spoke with a tinge of distress in her heart.

“Master… I’m back.”

Lu Zhou put down the pen in his hand. He let out a sigh of relief and put aside the thick stack of papers. He smiled and looked at Han Mengqi who was standing by the door.

“Meng Qi? You’re back already?”

Han Mengqi nodded and spoke.

“I just got off the plane.”

“Why didn’t you call me when you got off the plane? I could have asked Wang Peng to pick you up… By the way, why did you bring your suitcase here? Didn’t you go home?”

“I’ll go back later.”

She looked like she wanted to say something, so Lu Zhou spoke with a smile.

“How was your trip to America?”

“It was smooth…” Han Mengqi nodded and added in a quiet voice, “I also received an award by the way.”

An award.

Not bad.

Lu Zhou smiled embarrassedly.

“Oh? What award?”

“Young Scholar Progress Award…”

In fact, in addition to the awards given to her by the International Union of Materials Research Societies, there were also another series of events such as the dinner party at the White House, meeting with the president of the American Society for Metals, and so forth.

Other than the Young Scholar Progress Award, she basically had “no achievements” in the materials science field. All these special treatments made her feel flattered.

In fact, the reason why she went to Jin University immediately after returning to China, besides sharing the good news of her award with her master, was also because she had a lot of questions to ask him.

However, she didn’t expect to see Lu Zhou in such a tired state…

“Master…”

“What?”

Han Mengqi said with a worried look, “I heard that you haven’t slept for two days.”

“Two days?” Lu Zhou looked at the stack of more than 500 pages on the table. He frowned and said, “It’s been that long?”

Han Mengqi: “I think it’s better for you to take a break.”

“It’s fine, it’s only two days, I haven’t reached my record yet.” Lu Zhou smiled and continued, “I will go to rest after I reply to the email.”

“Email? How about you tell me what to write? I’ll do it for you.”

After yawning, Lu Zhou waved his hand and picked up the breakfast on the corner of the table.

“No need, I’ll write the email myself. I can’t explain this to you for now. If you really want to write it, I’m afraid the sun will go down before you understand what I’m trying to say.”

“What problem is it…”

“ABC conjecture.”

“… ABC conjecture?!” Han Mengqi was stunned when she heard Lu Zhou’s answer. She asked with a dazed expression on her face, “Why did you decide to… suddenly research this problem?”

If she remembered correctly, he should be busy on the Mars landing project.

And he seemed to have said more than once that he would not research pure mathematics any time soon…

“Life is always full of surprises… I didn’t expect this either.” Lu Zhou coughed and said, “Anyway, because of some special reasons, I’m researching this now. Don’t worry about me. Go back and unpack your luggage. Take some rest, get rid of the jet lag, then report back here.”

Han Mengqi was forced out of the office by Lu Zhou. She stood in the corridor outside the office with a dazed expression.

After hesitating, she took out her mobile phone, opened her contacts list, and dialed a number.

The phone rang twice and was connected.

A familiar voice soon came from the other end.

“Meng Qi? Are you back? I was just about to call you.”

“Well, I just got off the plane… Um, sis, you should come to Jin University.”

“Jin University? Why?”

“Lu Zhou, he seems to have not slept for two days… I am a little worried about him. If you don’t have time to come over, at least call to persuade him.”

“Hasn’t slept in two days?! Are you with him now? I’ll come right now!”

Chen Yushan got up from her office chair and ended the phone call.

Han Mengqi took a deep breath and put the phone back into her pocket.

She looked back at the office and thought in her heart.

Master, that’s all I can do!

Don’t die on us…

…

Dying was not going to happen.

It was just two days of no sleep.

If Lu Zhou remembered correctly, his highest record of no sleeping was for seven consecutive days. He slept for two or three days straight afterward to recover.

That was back in Princeton. He was researching Goldbach’s conjecture or the Navier-Stokes equations; he couldn’t remember. Staying up late was normal for him.

He remembered that, one time, he felt like he was floating on the clouds; he couldn’t tell whether he was in the sky or on the ground.

But that feeling of extreme concentration allowed him to completely break through the bottleneck and enter a new level. However, he knew that he was just one step from reaching “heaven”…

“Sigh, time is not forgiving, I’m getting old too… I can’t mess around like I’m twenty anymore.”

After eating, Lu Zhou gradually felt a trace of sleepiness in his heart. He extracted a tube of energy medicine from the system space, unscrewed the bottle cap, and swallowed it slowly.

A mint-fresh coolness spread along his throat to the front of his brain. He soon felt that the fatigue that crawled all over his body was like a tidal wave, completely fading from his body.

After refreshing his spirits, Lu Zhou picked up the stack of papers from a corner of the table and found the page where he had left off. He turned on the computer and started writing the email.

Before this, he was uncertain about Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity, but now, he was 80% certain that it was Shinichi Mochizuki himself[1: Shinichi Mochizuki has denied this in an interview. This is only a rumor in the mathematics circle. Don’t take the plot of this novel too seriously.]

This paper on the proof of the ABC conjecture was clearly a revised version of the paper Shinichi Mochizuki previously published on the Internet.

Because it was an unpublished version, there was neither an abstract nor a title. Lu Zhou only realized after he read more than 20 pages that this paper was a bit familiar. He was certain after he read more than 30 pages. This was the “Anabelian geometry” and the “Inter-universal Teichmüller theory” that only a few people in the world understood.

In fact, Mochizuki’s proof of the core idea of the ABC conjecture was very simple to summarize. It transformed this abstract problem into a more abstract elliptic curve, a special two-dimensional cubic equation.

This transformation process was actually not difficult to understand. One only had to associate the same image of each “ABC equation” with the elliptic curve whose x-axis intersects at a, b, and the origin. After this transformation, proving the ABC conjecture was equivalent to proving that there was a certain unequal relationship between the two values of the constructed elliptic curve.

This operation of transforming algebraic problems into geometric problems could transform a simple number theory problem into geometry, calculus, and other fields. This was so that more mathematical tools could be applied.

In terms of this proof alone, this set of operations was actually very classic. Wiles used a similar method to prove the core part of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Unfortunately, although the idea behind the proof was remarkable, when this idea was transformed into a paper of more than 500 pages, everything became less friendly.

Many people even commented that to fully understand what “Anabelian geometry” and “Inter-universal Teichmüller theory” was probably more difficult than solving the ABC conjecture itself.

The famous number theorist Professor Caligali even stated bluntly that this paper was a “complete disaster”.

Lu Zhou remembered that a few years ago, Schultz and his partner had visited Beijing and discussed the issue face to face with Shinichi Mochizuki, but the final result turned out to be the same. A dispute between the two sides of the field.

Schultz complained that he stood on a Penrose stairs that never ended, while Mochizuki insisted that he “knows nothing at all” and “can’t even understand the basic definition”.

As for Lu Zhou…

His opinion was the same as Schultz.

[I have read the paper.

[Although it has undergone certain modifications compared with the previous version, in my view, there are still large loopholes. Especially in the part of inference 3.12. If you want to clarify the relationship between the volume of the set, you must at least establish a relationship between the measurement standards of the volume in each different space. However, in the mapping you give, the quantity rulers are locally compatible with each other…

[In summary…

[Your proof is wrong.]

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