January 28th.
California San Jose.
As the city hosting Joint Mathematics Meeting this year, many mathematicians have come here in the past two days.
Joint Mathematics Meeting is an important conference second only to International Congress of Mathematicians in the mathematics world. There are quite a lot of people participating. According to statistics, there are definitely more people attending the Princeton mathematics conference at the beginning of the month.
Under normal circumstances, the number of participants in the Princeton mathematics conference will not exceed a thousand people. However, this year there is a bonus of Twin Prime Conjecture, which makes the conference at the beginning of the year particularly popular.
Of course, this has also caused a problem. After some mathematicians participated in the Princeton mathematics conference at the beginning of the month, they did not plan to attend the Joint Mathematics Meeting at the end of the month. After all, flying there is still very troublesome.
However, sometimes accidents happen.
On the mathoverflow mathematics exchange platform, as Joint Mathematics Meeting is about to be held, it has been discussed again.
In a video called [Xiao Yi, you are enough! Half a month later, I took another flight from the United Kingdom, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and flew to the United States!] Under the post, quite a few people are complaining.
The poster is a United Kingdom postdoctoral fellow in mathematics at Imperial College. He said from his position on the first floor: [I originally didn't want to attend the Princeton annual mathematics conference at the beginning of the month. As a result, I learned that the Twin Prime Conjecture report would be held at that time, so I went, and then I did not plan to attend the Joint Mathematics Meeting at the end of the month.
In the end, who would have thought that Joint Mathematics Meeting would issue a statement saying that they had temporarily invited Xiao Yi to hold another lecture, again about Xiao's Polynomial Expansion!
How abominable!
Bullying me happens to be studying this field, right?
Well now, I spent a lot of money to go to Princeton, and now I have to spend a lot of money again!
Xiao Yi, you really made me miserable. Can you do such a big thing again in the future? Can you give me some time in between?]
Then in the replies below, a lot of people expressed their agreement.
A doctoral student from École Normale Supérieure said: [It's hard not to support it, and so do I. I originally wanted to witness the proof of Twin Prime Conjecture, so I flew there. As for jointly attending the meeting, I didn't have much interest. I looked at the titles of their reports and basically didn't interest me. The result is now good. Xiao's expansion is just right for the complex analysis topic I am studying, so I have to participate.
This trip has spent all my travel money this year!]
And from University of Bonn: [Me too! I really miss the last time I saw Xiao Yi at my doorstep. Unfortunately, that time Xiao Yi brought neither the proof of Twin Prime Conjecture nor a new method like Xiao's expansion. It just ended the dispute over the abc conjecture.]
There are even students from Shangjing University in China who also appeared in the post: [Either keep up with Scholar Xiao, or be left far behind by him. There are only two options. Among these two options, I chose to spend money to keep up with Scholar Xiao.]
However, under these replies, a professor from Oxford University expressed questions about their complaints: [I want to ask a question, can you understand his lecture?]
The original poster replied: [I really don't understand this.]
So the Oxford professor made a sharp comment on this. "Save it, you guys can't understand his lecture, why do you have to come and watch it?" This is not the right way to study mathematics. It not only wastes your money, but also increases trouble. What do you get in the end? It's just like participating in a Champions League final. In the end, apart from the excitement of watching the game and showing off to friends, there is no real gain.
As someone who has experienced it, what I want to say is that for you young people like postdocs and Ph. D. s, it is not feasible to aim too high. You have to be down-to-earth and learn step by step. Watching a report will not increase your knowledge, books will do.]
This Oxford professor's sharp comments immediately made newcomers to mathematics like the poster feel ashamed.
This is indeed the case. They couldn't understand Xiao Yi's report at all. As for why they were keen to participate in Xiao Yi's report, they probably went there with the mentality of chasing stars.
Obviously, this mentality is wrong.
The poster finally admitted his mistake sincerely: [Professor, you are right, I understand, and I will never spend money on meaningless things like this again.]
The professor replied: [This is correct, kid.]
All this looks like an old man in the field of mathematics teaching the younger generations.
However, if you scroll down further, you will find another mathematics professor from Oxford University, who revealed the true face of this "old-timer": [Max, please stop coaxing these young people here. Isn't it because you didn't get the seat at Princeton last time? He actually came here to fool them.]
Immediately, those young people who had been criticized and did not dare to reply could no longer hold back, and then they all replied below: [Professor, just say so if you can't get a ticket! We can help you!]
In the end, Professor Max couldn't stand such a social death scene, deleted his comments, and ran away.
Amidst the laughter, the comments below resumed, discussing this time Joint Mathematics Meeting.
Then someone raised something: [I suddenly learned the news in the past two days that many computer experts suddenly decided to participate in this report. Do you know about this?]
People suddenly became confused.
[Computer person? Why did they come to the Joint Mathematics Conference?]
[Among all the lectures this time, there are only two that have something to do with computer science, right?]
Some people even started to laugh: [Can they understand our report?]
[Did they suddenly realize the importance of mathematics and begin to plan to retake mathematics?]
As a discipline at the top of the contempt chain, it is quite normal for such comments to appear, and even such comments are approved by many people.
However, they are still a little confused, what do the computer people want to do?
"It's such a headache. Maybe we shouldn't let Xiao Yi prepare this report at all. When the time comes, it will be over after awarding him Cole Algebra Prize. It is easy and can cause a topic in the mathematics community. How can it be like now, which is all trouble."
San Jose International Conference Center, Joint Mathematics Meeting Office, Hailes Carr looked through the information on the arrangement of this meeting on the computer and said rather helplessly.
Hales Carr, Permanent Vice Chairman of AMS, is also Chairman of the Organizing Committee of this year's Joint Mathematics Meeting.
Next to him, Adam Douglass, the professor who personally went to UCLA to invite Xiao Yi to give a lecture at this Joint Mathematics Meeting, heard the words of the vice chairman and shook his head helplessly and said, " There is nothing we can do about it. If he had not been invited, there would have been only 1,500 people participating in the report. Now, as soon as we released the news, the number of participants immediately increased to 2,000, returning to the previous level."
"So this means that we have to process the information of more than 500 new participants in the past few days." Hailes Carr sighed, "I have never worked overtime for so long."
"And the most critical issue is..."
The name Chairman of the Organizing Committee took another look at the lists and said with great confusion, "Why did so many experts in the computer field suddenly apply?"
"And they also specify that you want to participate in Xiao Yi's report?"
"Did they understand Twin Prime Conjecture's proof or did they understand Xiao's expansion? Or maybe Parity Check Classification Sieve made those guys who study cryptography unable to sleep, so they wanted to come and ask Xiao Yi how to solve it?"
"Nelson Guerra, Bernard Usher, Quentin Donnelly... I remember these individuals. They are all celebrities in the field of computer security, right? They are all good at cryptography."
"And this! How can a rich man like Brian Winston, Chief Information Officer of World Bank, still have time to care about a pure mathematics conference like ours? What are you doing with nothing to do? If I were him, I would have parties in the big villa every day."
There was laughter in the room.
"By the way, there's this, Silvio Micali, winner of the Turing Award! He actually came here too... Well, I know this guy, and he's really good at mathematics. It seems that he won the Turing Award because of his outstanding contributions to cryptography, right? But we didn't have a report on cryptography at this meeting?"
"And this, Google Senior Vice President of Knowledge and Information, Prabhakar Raghavan..."
"Forget about these awesome people." Hailes Carr complained, "There are other people whose names I haven't heard of, but they are basically professors. Well, there are... almost more than two hundred people!"
"Do they want to turn our Joint Mathematics Meeting into their computer conference?"
Hearing Hailes Carr's resentful tone, Douglass next to him could only persuade him, "Okay, Hailes, isn't Jones investigating the cause now?"
As he said that, he saw another person next to him and asked, "Hey, Jones, how's your check going?"
Jones Charles, who is also a director of the organizing committee, finally raised his head after hearing Douglass calling him, but his face looked a little strange.
"Uh... Professor Karl, you seemed to be right just now, but... you were only half right."
Hailes Carr was stunned and asked, "What did I say right?"
Jones Charles said, "Some of them may indeed have come to Xiao Yi for classification and screening attacks, but Xiao Yi has already solved this problem!"