The sky outside the window was bright.
Lu Zhou, who was lying on his desk, slowly opened his eyes.
He rubbed his eyebrows and looked at the calendar on the corner of his desk.
It's already May …
Lu Zhou shook his head.
Ever since he came to Princeton in February, he had spent most of his time in this ten square meter apartment. Other than driving to the supermarket to buy groceries, he basically did not leave the house.
The most distressing thing was the US $5000 club card. He had not even used it a few times.
Ever since he accepted the mission, he had been challenging Goldbach's conjecture for nearly half a year.
Now, all of this finally came to an end.
Lu Zhou took a deep breath and stood up from his chair.
He was at the last step, so he was not in a rush anymore.
He hummed a song as he walked into the kitchen and made himself something to eat. Lu Zhou even took out a bottle of champagne from the fridge and poured it for himself.
The champagne had been bought two months ago just for this moment.
After quietly enjoying his dinner, Lu Zhou calmly went to the kitchen to wash his hands. He then returned to his desk and began to wrap up his work.
After crossing nearly fifty pages of paper, he picked up his pen and continued to write at the place where he had fallen asleep the day before.
[… Obviously, we have formula (30), Lemma 8, Lemma 9, and Lemma 10 to prove that Theorem 1 is true.]
The so-called Theorem 1 was the mathematical expression of Goldbach's conjecture that he defined in his thesis.
Which was, given a sufficiently large even number N, there were prime numbers P1 and P2, satisfying N = P1 + P2.
Similarly, there was Chen's theorem N = P1 + P2 · P3, as well as a series of theorems about P (a, b).
Of course, although this formula was called Theorem 1 in his thesis, it might not take long for the mathematics community to accept his proof process. Then, this theorem might be upgraded to something like "Lu type theorem".
However, this kind of major mathematical conjecture usually took a long time to review.
Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture took three years to be recognized by the mathematics community. Because Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture was mixed with a lot of "mysterious terms", the review threshold was at least to understand his "Universal Era Theory". Therefore, no one had finished reading it, and it was difficult to predict the future.
The speed of reviewing a major conjecture largely depended on the popularity of the proposition and how "new" the work was.
When Lu Zhou proved the twin prime number theorem, he did not use any new theories. He only used the topology method mentioned in Professor Zellberg's 1995 thesis. People who had already studied the thesis could quickly understand what he had done.
As for the thesis that proved the Polignac-Lu theorem, the review period was significantly longer.
Even though his Group Structure Method had been reflected in the proof of the twin prime number theorem, the modification made it far from the scope of the sieve method. Even if the reviewer was a big name like Deligné, it still took him a long time to make a final conclusion.
Lu Zhou wrote a total of fifty pages in this thesis on the proof of Goldbach's conjecture. He spent at least half of the space on the theoretical framework he built for the entire proof.
This part of the work could even be published as a separate thesis.
To a large extent, his review period depended on other people's interest in the theoretical framework he proposed.
As for how long it would take, it was not something he could control.
In fact, Lu Zhou had been thinking about what the system's criteria for mission completion was.
If he completed a proof of a theorem, but no one recognized his work for ten or even decades, did it mean that his mission would be stuck for that long?
What he did not understand was that since the system had a huge amount of data stored in its database, it must have come from a higher civilization. This civilization was at least more advanced than Earth's civilization.
Lu Zhou didn't care about the motivation for its existence. He felt like the system from an advanced civilization wouldn't consider the opinions of the "natives" to determine whether a problem was solved.
Lu Zhou's conclusion was that the completion of the system mission should be determined by two factors.
One was correctness.
The other was publicity!
In fact, there was a very simple way to verify whether his proof was correct or not.
If it was just for publicity, he did not have to publish it in a journal …
…
After Lu Zhou completed his thesis on Goldbach's conjecture, he spent three days organizing everything on his computer and converting it into a PDF file. He then logged onto the arXiv website and uploaded the thesis.
He was more than ninety percent sure that it was correct, because he had a habit of rigorously verifying every conclusion and repeatedly scrutinizing all the places that might be wrong.
As for publicity …
There was no peer review process on arXiv, so it was undoubtedly the fastest choice!
The only drawback was that it conflicted with the submission rules of some journals and conferences. For example, uploading the thesis before the deadline might violate the double-blind rules. However, Lu Zhou did not care about these things anymore. He believed that the journals that accepted the thesis would not care about these details.
After all, the author was no longer a nobody. He was the winner of the Cole Prize in Number Theory. The academic result was not some unknown work. It was the Goldbach's conjecture from Hilbert's 23 problems. It was one of the crowns of analytic number theory, second only to the Millennium Prize Problems!
In two days, he would reorganize the thesis and solve the formatting problems. He would then submit it to Annual Mathematics.
When he proved Wiles' thesis on Fermat's last theorem, it was reviewed by six reviewers at the same time. Lu Zhou didn't know how many big names would review his thesis, but it should be at least four, right?
When Lu Zhou saw the pop-up notification that the upload was completed, he let out a sigh of relief.
This way, it was finally published, right?
After the thesis was published, people or research units that were interested in this field would receive an alert (similar to a reminder). If he wasn't mistaken, someone in a certain corner of the world was already reading his article.
He did not know if the system had a judgment value for the number of people reading the thesis. If it did, he would have to wait a few days to verify his guess.
Lu Zhou sat in front of his computer and waited for a cup of coffee. He then closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and began to chant.
"System."
When he opened his eyes once more, what entered his eyes was a pure white.
It had been a long time since he last came here. This time, Lu Zhou felt a little unaccustomed to this place.
He walked to the side of the translucent holographic screen. With a hint of anxiety, he reached out and pressed on the mission bar.
Soon, he would be able to verify his guess …
At the same time, he would know if his idea was correct.
Wait a minute …
Suddenly, Lu Zhou realized a problem.
If the system did not respond to him, did it mean that his analysis of the mission completion criteria was wrong, or did it mean that there was a problem with his thesis?
However, the system did not give him time to think about this problem.
A notification that sounded like the sounds of nature rang out.
Then, a line of text appeared in front of him.
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