On the outskirts of St. Petersburg, on the banks of the Fontanka River.
An old man wearing a windbreaker was sitting on a bench. He looked at his watch, as if he was waiting for something.
Two teenagers wearing baseball caps walked past him while bouncing a basketball. One of them spoke to the other.
“Did you hear the news about the virtual reality closed beta testing?”
“I did, in Jinling, right? F*ck, I want to go!”
“Forget about it, people like us will never get the chance. I don’t believe they’re choosing people at random. Did you see YouTuber James Rolfe’s vlog? He said that if the virtual reality technology from Star Sky Technology is similar to SAO, he’ll eat his keyboard!”
“Haha, so did he do it?”
“Don’t know, but I heard after he returned from China, he ordered a keyboard cake from a bakery.”
“Hahahahaha!”
There was a pleasant atmosphere in the air. The laughter and conversation of the two young men gradually faded away.
Professor Faltings looked at their direction and frowned.
Jinling?
He didn’t expect to hear this word in a suburban area like this.
Faltings thought about Lu Zhou and had a nostalgic look on his face.
He didn’t care about virtual reality or the YouTuber.
Ever since smartphones came out, boomers like him had begun falling behind the new era of technology. Even if he wanted to keep up, he simply did not have the energy.
Suddenly, a middle-aged man with a scruffy beard, holding shopping bags, walked up to the bench and said, “You actually came.”
Faltings looked at him and said, “Yeah, is there a problem?”
“Nothing, I’m just surprised to see the great Faltings in person…”
Perelman’s face was almost covered by the large baguette in his grocery bag. He took out a key and threw it in Faltings’ hands. He said, “My house is a bit messy, hope you don’t mind. Can you open the door for me later…”
“Sure.” Faltings nodded and said, “Do you need help with those?”
Perelman shook his head and spoke.
“It’s fine, I don’t need an old man to carry my groceries.”
The two walked toward the residential area and soon arrived at a cheap-looking apartment building.
No one could have expected a world-renowned mathematician to live in a 20 square meter apartment, whose neighbors were either elderly Russian folks living on welfare or unemployed millennials.
However, Perelman did not care.
After giving up the Millennium Prize Problems million dollar award, he was allegedly relying on his mother’s pension to buy groceries. He had been tangled in between ideals and reality, choosing to leave the community of mathematics over his strong moral principles. He resorted back to a 19th-century mathematics research style…
Which was, to be on a permanent retreat, closed from communication.
In some sense, he was similar to Lu Zhou.
The only difference was that Lu Zhou would publish any worthy in-progress results, and if he was too lazy to submit a paper, he would at least upload a preprint. However, Perelman had not uploaded his research results in a long time.
Perelman placed the groceries in the kitchen and wiped his hands on his shirt. He went into the tiny living room and was about to offer Faltings some water or tea. However, he suddenly noticed a paper on the table.
He looked interested, and he picked up the paper and began flipping through it.
“What’s this…”
“A paper on motive theory,” Professor Faltings said as he took out a vacuum flask from his windbreaker. He poured himself a cup of hot water and said, “The author proposed a very interesting idea to combine all cohomology theories into an abstract geometric object.”
Perelman said, “That’s a crazy idea.”
Faltings: “It is.”
Perelman: “So it’s like the mathematics Grand Unified Theory?”
Faltings: “It is.”
“I can’t believe there’s a scholar doing this… Wait a second,” Perelman said as he read the paper. His eyebrows furrowed as he said, “This paper… looks a bit familiar.”
Faltings had a smile on his face, which was a rare sight for a serious man like him.
“It looks like you have noticed.”
Perelman said, “Lu Zhou?”
Faltings nodded and spoke.
“Yeah.”
Faltings took a sip of hot water and said, “Three days ago, he uploaded this paper to Inventiones Mathematicae. I don’t know if he and the Secretary-General of the International Mathematical Union made an agreement on publishing to Inventiones Mathematicae, but that’s not the point.”
Perelman said, “The point is that he actually solved a weak form of Grothendieck’s standard conjectures, as well as finding a cohomology ring motive structure.”
“That’s right.” Faltings nodded and said, “I guess I’m correct, you’re the perfect person to review this paper.”
Perelman looked at the paper in his hand with a blank face.
“You didn’t come all the way to Russia, just to ask me to review an Inventiones Mathematicae paper. You could have just emailed me.”
Faltings nodded and said, “Of course, I didn’t come here for such a trivial matter.”
Perelman put down the paper and didn’t say anything. He waited for Faltings to speak.
Without beating around the bush, Faltings said, “Come to the University of Bonn.”
Perelman spoke without hesitating.
“No.”
Professor Faltings ignored his answer and continued, “The mathematics world has reached a critical crossroads. Numbers and geometry are going to merge into one abstract form. I wouldn’t be surprised if algebra and geometry are unified tomorrow. But it may also never be unified.”
Perelman muttered, “Isn’t Lu Zhou working on this research project? Just let him do it, there hasn’t been anything he can’t solve.”
“That’s not necessarily true. Seven years ago, he found a 750 GeV characteristic peak at CERN. He hasn’t been able to give a physical explanation for this peak.”
Perelman: “That’s physics, this is mathematics.”
“Yes, that is physics,” Faltings said. “But that’s not the point, the point is that this project shouldn’t be done by him alone.
“We can’t put all of our future expectations on him. If we don’t contribute ourselves, the academic world will never grow.”
Faltings looked at Perelman and spoke in a sincere way.
“The Bourbaki school of thought needs your help, the entire mathematics world needs your help.
“At my age, there are many things that are out of my control. I hope you can contribute to a cause you are passionate about.”
Perelman looked at the paper on the table and pondered.
“… I’ll think about it.”
He picked up the paper and said, “Let me finish reading this first.”
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