Awakening Elementary School System in University

With that, he distributed the documents. He and the two graduate students from the business school beside him bent their heads over the papers, studying and discussing them word by word, occasionally scribbling notes and diagrams in their notebooks.

The conference room quieted down, leaving only the soft rustle of flipping pages.

Principal Chang nodded in satisfaction, then turned to Chen Lin and Huang Yiyi with a smile. "Well, let’s not stand around. We can get those forms filled out first."

"Okay."

So, under Huang Yiyi’s patient and meticulous guidance, Chen Lin also picked up a pen and began filling out form after form.

...

...

While Chen Lin was busy in the conference room bringing his company into existence...

In the School of Mathematics building, Professor Gu Ming was holding a cup of coffee, leaning back comfortably in his office chair.

He had just finished an online video conference with an international team, where they had discussed a thorny project issue. Now, he was about to browse the latest academic journals to unwind.

As he opened his inbox, an unread email from Chen Lin immediately caught his eye.

’Oh? He sent over the first draft of the paper?’

Professor Gu Ming’s spirits lifted. He quickly set down his cup and clicked on the email.

The body of the email was simple, just one sentence: "Hello, Professor Gu. The first draft of the paper’s main text is complete. Please see the attachment for your review."

Gu Ming’s gaze quickly fell on the title of the PDF attachment.

[A "Slice-Filter-Convex Hull" Solution to High-Dimensional Monge-Ampère Equations and Its Theoretical Framework for Identifying Data Manifold Boundaries in Generative Models]

...

Even though he had heard the title from Chen Lin before, seeing the absurdly long title again still made the corner of Gu Ming’s eye twitch.

If any other undergraduate had sent a paper with a title like this, Gu Ming wouldn’t have even bothered opening the attachment. He would have immediately fired back a sternly worded email telling them to choose a more realistic topic.

’To engage in scholarship, one must first have a sincere and humble heart.’

’Those who are impatient for success and bite off more than they can chew are doomed to fail.’

’How could an undergraduate, no matter how gifted in mathematics, possibly produce any decent results on a world-class problem like the Monge-Ampère equation?’

However...

His attitude toward Chen Lin, however, was different.

The memory of those flawless, perfect-score exam papers, and the live problem-solving that had even moved Academician Liang Tianshi, caused the doubt in Gu Ming’s heart to give way just a little.

’Perhaps... he really did just as he said, merely following the path of his predecessors and pushing the research forward "a little bit"?’

’Yes, that’s possible.’

Musing to himself, Gu Ming clicked open the attachment.

Still, he prepared himself for what to do if the research turned out to have no real substance. He would have to find a gentle way to tell Chen Lin to take it back and start over.

He’d have to make the student understand that you can’t just aim high without the ability to back it up, all while not crushing his precious confidence and interest in research...

With this cautious and rather complex mix of feelings, Gu Ming’s eyes fell upon the main body of the paper.

And then, the expression on his face began to subtly change.

At first, there was a hint of bewilderment.

He found the paper’s writing style to be utterly amateurish.

It was filled with colloquialisms, and the transitions between paragraphs were clumsy, lacking the rigorous, standardized flow expected of an academic paper.

No veteran who had written even a few academic papers would make such a basic mistake.

Seeing this, Gu Ming actually breathed a sigh of relief.

’At least this proves that Chen Lin really did write it himself, word by word, and didn’t just plagiarize or stitch it together from other sources.’

But as he continued reading, shifting his attention from the writing style to the core content, the heart he had just set at ease leaped back into his throat.

As he read on, his brow furrowed unconsciously. His expression shifted from its initial caution to gravity, and finally, to deep contemplation.

From the paper’s initial framing of the research problem, to the construction of the entire framework, to the creation of the new mathematical method Chen Lin had named the "Slice-Filter-Convex Hull" method...

...every part that involved pure mathematical theory was just like those exam papers he had graded two weeks ago.

Flawless!

It could even be described as breathtakingly brilliant!

If that were all, it would have been one thing.

After all, following that worldview-shattering exam, Gu Ming felt he had a relatively complete picture of Chen Lin’s mathematical abilities.

But what truly sent a shockwave through him was the discovery that—even with his credentials as a Cambridge Ph.D. and a professor at Yannan University’s School of Mathematics—he was reading this paper at an incredibly slow pace.

He could understand every derivation and calculation in the paper after careful consideration.

But every few paragraphs, he had to stop, frown, and think it over repeatedly. He even had to pick up a pen and work through the calculations on a scratch pad just to fully grasp the logical chain.

This feeling...

Gu Ming searched his memory. The last time he had struggled this much with a paper was during his Ph.D. at Cambridge, when he first read his advisor’s paper on the Langlands Program, published in the *Mathematical Annals*!

The research progress proposed in this paper was, as Chen Lin had claimed, just "one small step" beyond the current research bottleneck.

But that one small step was precise, critical, and profoundly insightful!

It was no exaggeration to say that this paper held more value than all the other papers he had read in the field of Differential Geometry this year combined.

"This... How is this possible?"

Gu Ming muttered to himself, his eyes filled with disbelief.

Intuitively, he was inclined to trust Chen Lin’s character.

But based on the understanding he had built over a twenty-year academic career, he found it truly difficult to believe that this was a paper written by an undergraduate student.

No matter how brilliantly Chen Lin had solved problems before, in Gu Ming’s eyes, that only demonstrated his immense potential and his exceptional ability to master and apply mathematical knowledge and tools.

But that was worlds apart from making a contribution at the forefront of a mathematical field—a contribution significant enough to propel the entire discipline forward!

’Could it be... he referenced a brand-new paper that was just published, one I haven’t had a chance to see yet?’

The thought suddenly surfaced in Gu Ming’s mind, and he clung to it like a drowning man to a straw.

He selected a core argument from the paper and pasted it directly into the Doggie search bar.

He hit Enter.

The search results that appeared on the screen were a motley collection, but not a single one had the slightest connection to the passage he had copied.

Not ready to give up, Gu Ming switched to several specialized academic search engines. The result was the same.