Seeing the name, Faltings silently moved the cursor on the screen to the PDF link beside the title and clicked it.
After entering the paper's PDF page, he downloaded it, opened the PDF reader, and began reading.
"It's actually that kid Xiao Yi's paper... Isn't he at UCLA now? How does he still have time to publish papers?"
Faltings couldn't help but think that.
And the result he had produced was actually this important.
"Abstract... Through an automorphic-theoretic inversion of étale algebraic varieties based on the classification sieve, fundamental group information is extracted from L-functions... After analytic continuation and a polynomial expansion in a Fourier expansion-like form... This paper primarily demonstrates its use in approximating the critical line of the Riemann Hypothesis, ultimately pushing the Critical Line Theorem to 50%, though I believe there remains room for improvement."
The Critical Line Theorem, which had seen no breakthrough for so long in relation to the Riemann Hypothesis, had been directly pushed to 50%!
Faltings would bet that this result would have an adrenaline-shot effect on the entire mathematical community, even if it did not truly prove the Riemann Hypothesis.
Because it meant that, after more than thirty years, critical-line approximation was still a viable approach to solving the Riemann Hypothesis.
It could reignite the mathematical community's further exploration of critical-line approximation and encourage more people to give it a try.
This was the Riemann Hypothesis!
Even the slightest possibility could stir the enthusiasm of the entire mathematical community.
As for last year's paper, it wasn't important, because going from 40% to 41.7% truly wasn't such an enormous achievement. Faltings had read that paper too, and the methods it used weren't especially striking. In fact... he could tell what method it used just by reading the abstract once.
He had once achieved