As Xiao Yi had expected, the meal turned into a gossip session.
He had nothing much to say about that.
In truth, anyone who paid attention to him would gossip about him.
Whether it was the people around him or the many people online, the main reason was that they generally could not understand the work he was doing, so they could only turn to things that everyone found interesting.
He parried their questions while brushing them off.
But in the end, Mother Xiao and Father Xiao saw Luo Mingya's photo from the old lady and recognized her as the girl he had gone out to meet early one snowy Lunar New Year morning.
Naturally, there was another round of teasing, but he simply let it go in one ear and out the other.
While eating, he continued pondering his next approach to proving the Artin Conjecture.
That was, using the Weil Conjecture to solve the problem currently before him.
The Weil Conjecture was the Weil conjecture, proven by Pierre Deligne in the last century. Its proof was regarded as one of the most important achievements in mathematics since then, and it later provided a closer connection between Algebraic Geometry and number theory, making it a milestone of modern mathematics.
What Xiao Yi needed was the first part of the Weil conjecture: for a smooth projective variety X defined over a finite field, its Zeta function ζ(X,s) satisfied a functional equation. Replacing s with 1-s and then multiplying by certain Gamma factors and constants yielded ζ(X,1-s).
"Obviously, the extended L-function I came up with has very similar properties in this regard..."
Even while eating, Xiao Yi was thinking about this. If it had not been inconvenient, he would have started scribbling calculations on draft paper right beside the table.
And