The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner, Martin Chalfie, once said in an interview that if you were lucky enough to make some achievements, people would do terrible things to you.
They would say to you, "Hey, you might win the Nobel Prize." Starting from the first week of October, you would begin to suffer from insomnia, and you would become extremely sensitive to any ringtone. Even if it was your neighbor's phone, it would make you paranoid …
Until the day you actually received a call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In addition to the Swedish-style surprise, the main reason for doing this was to ensure that the winner would not brag about it in advance, which would ruin the expectations of scientific researchers.
The phone call to inform the winner was usually made a few minutes before the prize was announced. Therefore, the Nobel Prize phone call could be said to be one of the most anticipated phone calls in the world. In just a few minutes, it could make people experience the thrill of bungee jumping.
When Lu Zhou received the phone call, he also experienced the thrill of bungee jumping in just a minute.
As for why he, who had never expected the Nobel Prize, experienced the thrill of bungee jumping in just a minute …
Because unfortunately, it was obviously not the Nobel Prize that came to him …
It was the Crafoord Prize.
Okay, actually, the Crafoord Prize wasn't bad.
It could even be said that it was very strong.
The prize was established in 1980 by industrialist Holger Crafoord and his wife, Anna Greta Crafoord. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was responsible for the selection. Although it was not as prestigious as the top three prizes in the mathematics world, in the natural sciences, it had the reputation of a mini Nobel Prize.
As for why?
Because the original intention of this award was to fill the gap of the Nobel Prize. Whether it was the process or the specifications of the award ceremony, it was all in accordance with the standards of the Nobel Prize.
The scope of the award included astronomy, mathematics, earth science, and life science fields that were not covered by the Nobel Prize. The award mechanism was selected once a year, and it was rotated between astronomy and mathematics, earth science, and biological science.
This year, it happened to be in the field of astronomy and mathematics. It would be awarded to the most outstanding recent contributions in the field.
The prize money was US $500,000.
Just like the Nobel Prize, the Crafoord Prize was also awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Usually, the winner would be notified a few minutes before the prize was announced. Lu Zhou, who was eating with Witten, was caught off guard by the sudden phone call.
In fact, the reason why Lu Zhou won this award was not because of Goldbach's conjecture, but because of his research in the field of prime numbers. However, the Annual Mathematics thesis that he published a few days ago had refreshed his list of achievements.
Furthermore, it was an achievement that could not be ignored.
Therefore, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences added the Goldbach-Lu theorem to the official website.
The five hundred thousand dollars and the medal that suddenly fell from the sky made Lu Zhou a little dizzy. He couldn't even remember how he got back to his office from the cafeteria.
He only remembered Witten smiling, patting him on the shoulder and congratulating him. When he came back to his senses, Witten was already sitting in his office and turning on his computer.
Lu Zhou logged onto the official website of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and refreshed it a few times. Finally, he saw the Crafoord Prize list.
And his name was impressively on the list.
The other two winners were Professor Roy Kerr from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and Professor Roger Branford from Stanford University in the United States. The two of them shared the Astronomy Prize because of their major contributions to the research on "Black holes with angular momentum and their effects" …
As for the mathematics prize, of course, he was the only winner.
When Lu Zhou saw this, he sighed in relief. He was sure that the phone call he just received was not a scam or an April Fool's joke.
Then, Lu Zhou closed the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences website and opened another website.
Now that he had confirmed the news of the award, he was only curious about one thing.
The five hundred thousand dollars in prize money.
How much is that in RMB?
…
Two hours after Lu Zhou received the phone call, he received an email from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Even though Lu Zhou did not know how they found out about his email account, he remembered that they could even get his private phone number, so it did not seem difficult for them to get his email account.
After all, whether it was on the professor profile page of Princeton University or in his personal information on arXiv, Lu Zhou had his own email account.
In this email from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in addition to an electronic invitation, the content was mainly a written retelling of what had been said on the phone earlier.
For example, the time of the award ceremony and the banquet after the award ceremony.
Also, as part of the celebration for the Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences held a three-day academic conference and invited him to give a special report on the winner.
As for the report time, it was obviously one hour.
Lu Zhou closed the email and took out the PowerPoint presentation from the Princeton report. He was about to edit it when he suddenly received a phone call.
This time, it wasn't a stranger who called. It was Old Tang.
As soon as the phone was connected, a familiar voice came from the other end.
"You proved Goldbach's conjecture?!"
Lu Zhou paused for a second and replied.
"Yeah, why?"
The other end of the phone went silent for a while before sighing.
"… Nothing, I'm just a little surprised." Old Tang paused for a second before he smiled and said, "There was a meeting in the mathematics department today. Halfway through the meeting, Annual Mathematics came in. We were talking about this year's enrollment plan, but the second half of the meeting was all about you. "
Even though Old Tang's tone was understated, his heart was filled with emotion.
When Lu Zhou asked him about the distribution of Mersenne prime numbers in the cafeteria, Old Tang advised Lu Zhou not to think about these things and to focus on functional analysis and applied mathematics.
Fate was a strange thing.
In just a few short years, Lu Zhou had grown to this point.
Tang Zhiwei was very pleased with his student, and he was proud of him from the bottom of his heart.
When Lu Zhou heard Old Tang's words, he did not know whether to laugh or cry.
"Um … I'm sorry."
He originally thought that his thesis would only get rid of a few unfinished theses, but he did not expect to mess up his alma mater's meeting.
Old Tang smiled and did not continue on this topic. Instead, he continued to speak.
"You've completed your PhD. Even though the school isn't in a rush for you to come back, there's still a graduation certificate and a degree certificate waiting for you. Principal Xu and Dean Lu have been urging me to ask you about it. So I asked on their behalf, when do you plan to come back and complete your doctorate? "
Jin Ling University and Princeton signed a joint training plan for Lu Zhou. After Lu Zhou completed his PhD at Princeton, he would return to China to do a report and receive his PhD from Jin Ling University.
Originally, he still had a teaching job, but it seemed like he could take it a little longer.
The school definitely supported Lu Zhou's plan to stay at Princeton as a professor.
After all, talent was not money, and it would not increase in value. Only political leaders liked to do this kind of thing.
In fact, a lot of scientific research principals knew that no matter how much Chinese universities invested in talent training, their ability to produce cutting-edge researchers was incomparable to a world-class university like Princeton.
Whether it was the academic environment or the hardware, this kind of gap could not be changed overnight. It was just like solving a major mathematics problem, everything required the efforts of several generations.
Encouraging talents to go to a higher level of scientific research was also a talent training policy for major universities.
There were also supporting policies to attract overseas talents, such as the Thousand People Program.
This was the so-called "send them out first, then invite them back".
Even if they could not invite them back when they were young, they could stay there and train a few more international students for their country.
For example, if a scholar from Jin Ling University could become a professor at Princeton, then Jin Ling University could have at least one more international student from Princeton every once in a while (in principle, the same university could only have one foreign professor). In previous years, there was almost no such spot.
At the same time, even if Jin Ling University could not get this spot, it would not disappear out of thin air. Under the same conditions, Chinese professors were more inclined to recruit Chinese students. This was almost the norm (there were counterexamples).
However, Jin Ling University's relief was unnecessary. Lu Zhou had a lot of things to learn, and he also needed overseas scientific research experience. At the same time, various resources from Princeton could help him complete the system's missions.
When the time was right, he would naturally go back.
After all, he was a nostalgic person.
Lu Zhou thought for a bit and said, "I have to go to Stockholm right away, but it won't take long. I'll be back in early June."
"Stockholm?" Old Tang paused for a second and asked, "Why are you going to Sweden?"
Lu Zhou smiled embarrassedly.
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