"It really feels like a joke."
At UCLA, Terence Tao finished reading the paper and could not help murmuring to himself.
It had been less than ten days since he and Xiao Yi had parted ways, right?
Did it have to be this exaggerated?
Although the mathematical community's predictions were, in some sense, fairly accurate, Maynard and he had known from the start that there was a prerequisite: Xiao Yi could not be involved in researching the problem.
And once Xiao Yi joined in, the Landau-Siegel Zero Conjecture could not possibly hold him back for long.
Especially since Xiao Yi had collaborated with Zhang Yitang.
In that case, it should probably have taken just two or three months. At most, five months.
Well, that had been what they originally thought.
But reality had happened like a joke.
After reading through the entire paper, just as with Xiao Yi's previous papers, he could not find any errors.
At least, that was true of the main line of reasoning.
The only issue was...
He could tell that Zhang Yitang had written this paper, and Zhang Yitang's papers tended to simplify quite a few proofs.
Mm...
He could only sigh.
Professor Zhang was already so old. Why did he have to write papers himself?
Would it not have been better to hand it over to Xiao Yi?
That way, everyone would have had a more comfortable time reading it. It would have benefited the mathematical community as well.
There were two things mathematicians hated most.
First, discovering phrases specifically used to gloss over proofs, such as "note that" and "it is obvious," while reading a paper. Second, not being allowed to use those phrases when writing their own papers.
It could be called a cancer of mathematics.
Riemann deserved a special mention here.