Awakening Elementary School System in University

As Professor Deligne finished speaking, the entire conference hall fell into a strange, deathly silence that lasted for several seconds.

It was immediately followed by an overwhelming torrent of discussion that instantly flooded the entire space!

Chen Lin’s mind went blank. His first reaction wasn’t whether he should accept the challenge. Instead, he was seized by a tremendous, ineffable shock that was almost horrifying.

Just yesterday, he had been shocked by Peter Schultz.

That young Fields Medal laureate, based solely on Chen Lin’s JAMS paper, had blazed a new trail. By combining the arithmetic geometry tools he was most familiar with, he had constructed an entirely new framework for the proof. It was more convoluted, but in theory, just as viable.

Aided by his Little Mathematician ability, Chen Lin had seen through the essence of that framework at a glance. But for that very reason, he could appreciate just how terrifying Schultz’s talent was.

It was a mathematical talent truly worthy of the title "the pinnacle of human intellect."

And yet, just a moment ago, Professor Deligne’s casual remark had once again completely upended Chen Lin’s understanding of the world.

’I know perfectly well that, thanks to my "Little Mathematician" title, I’m confident I can fully deduce the final algorithm within two hours.

’That’s a cheat! It’s a Rule-level Ability granted by the system!

’But what about Professor Deligne?

’He only listened to my presentation—which was incredibly dense with information and skipped over numerous intermediate steps—and yet he could accurately judge that I was just one step away from the final goal?

’This means that in the old professor’s mind, the time I need to complete this final step is short enough to be done during a temporary extension of a conference session!

’Even if Professor Deligne doesn’t know the exact time I need for the calculation, that vague yet terrifying intuition is frightening enough!’

The previous afternoon, while accompanying Shen Yan to a lecture, Chen Lin had taken the time to look up information online about these two titans who had joined remotely.

He hadn’t thought much of it, but what he found was staggering.

If Schultz was the most dazzling and brilliant young mathematician in the world today, then Faltings and Deligne, in their youth, had shone even brighter.

Schultz received the Fields Medal at age 31, though many believed his research achievements merited the award when he was just 27.

While certainly remarkable, Schultz had yet to solve one of the great problems in mathematics or prove a major theorem that would drive the entire field forward.

But for mathematicians of their caliber, the Fields Medal—the very award Academician Liang Tianshi longed for and which no Huaxia mathematician had yet managed to win—was merely the entry ticket into the annals of history.

At age 29, Professor Faltings proved the Model Conjecture, which had stumped the mathematical community for sixty years. In the process, he also proved the Shafarevich Conjecture and the Tate Conjecture. The entirely new methods he pioneered laid a solid foundation for subsequent research in arithmetic geometry; a large portion of it even served as the starting point for Schultz’s later work.

And Professor Deligne was on another level entirely—his achievements were almost absurd.

As a direct disciple of the "Mathematics Emperor" Grothendieck, he proved all three Weil Conjectures by the age of 29. His research had epoch-making significance in multiple fields, including algebra, geometry, and number theory.

The title "Humanity’s Last Mathematical Polymath" and his status as the only person in history to achieve a "Grand Slam of Mathematics"—winning the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Abel Prize, and the Crafoord Prize—said it all.

In any discussion today about the greatest living mathematicians, Professor Deligne is solidly ranked among the top five legends.

It wasn’t until today, until this very moment, when Chen Lin heard Professor Deligne’s words with his own ears, that he truly and viscerally understood just how formidable this great mathematician was.

’To think that a human brain alone could come so close to the Rule-level Ability granted by the system’s Little Mathematician title!’

Only by experiencing it firsthand could Chen Lin believe that such a person truly existed!

These chaotic thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant, and Chen Lin quickly returned to the present.

Professor Deligne’s proposal was simply too enticing. The buzz in the hall, far from subsiding, was growing even more intense.

"Accept it! You have to accept! This is an invitation from Professor Deligne!"

"My god, a live calculation? That’s too exciting! If he actually pulls it off, we’ll be witnessing history today!"

"Come on, Chen Shen, say yes! Let us see something amazing!"

Listening to the excited and expectant whispers from the audience, Chen Lin knew he couldn’t rashly agree.

He was well aware that the afternoon’s schedule had been set by the organizing committee long in advance.

His presentation time was over. According to the schedule, there was another forty-five-minute report in the main hall, followed by the one-and-a-half-hour closing ceremony.

This mathematics conference was jointly organized by Yanbei University, Huaqing University, and the Ministry of Education. It was a very high-profile event, and a major government official had even been invited to give a speech at the closing ceremony.

Therefore, in terms of rules and procedure, the most appropriate thing for him to do right now was to bow, leave the stage, and hand it over to the next speaker.

However, when his gaze subconsciously drifted to Director Feng Yunhai in the front row, he saw that the main organizer of the conference was wearing a conflicted expression. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes revealed a fierce internal struggle.

Feng Yunhai knew better than anyone that the safest, most prudent course of action was to strictly adhere to the established schedule and bring the conference to a successful conclusion.

But he also knew that if Chen Lin could actually perform a live calculation of that new algorithm on this highly anticipated stage, it would be an unparalleled boost to the conference’s publicity and to the international prestige of the Huaxia mathematics community.

This might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

Before Feng Yunhai had to wrestle with his decision for long, a figure quietly approached his side.

A gentle yet firm voice with a slight Italian accent spoke in English by his ear, "Director Feng, it seems you have a fortunate dilemma on your hands."

Startled, Feng Yunhai snapped his head to the side.

His pupils constricted slightly when he saw the man’s face.

He was a tall, handsome, middle-aged man with a signature faint smile and a gentle, scholarly air. It was none other than the next scheduled speaker for the main hall: Alessio Figalli, the 2018 Fields Medal laureate, an academician of the European Academy of Sciences, and the Chair Professor of Mathematics and Director of the Institute for Mathematical Research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.