Katerina and Xie Kefu were old partners. Back when they had studied at Saint Peter University, they had worked in the same group researching mathematical problems. In the end, they had also taken the stage together to present their proof.
This time, however, only the audience had changed—from teachers and fellow students to mathematicians from all over the world!
They were certainly nervous. During the first few minutes, Katerina and Xie Kefu stammered and faltered to varying degrees, occasionally producing painfully awkward tremors in their voices.
But the audience was understanding. Whenever either of them stumbled, everyone immediately responded with encouraging applause!
The applause for the beautiful Katerina was enthusiastic. The applause for the pyramid-scheme promoter Xie Kefu was passable.
Half an hour into the lecture, the two finally adapted to the atmosphere. Their coordination grew increasingly seamless. Like crosstalk performers who had hit their stride, they played off one another and continued speaking fluently!
They happened to have reached the key portion of Question 89.
"As everyone knows, intersections only occur when sliding along a Hamiltonian Vector Field. Citing Lagrange's Floer Homology results, we can guarantee that the square of D is zero!"
"In Floer's paper, conditions were imposed on Lagrangian Submanifolds and Symplectic Manifolds. This is the formula displayed on the big screen. At this point, we need to further discuss the situation involving the moduli space of holomorphic curves..."
"Since the Casson Invariant is the intersection number of the two submanifolds H and J, within the scope of this problem, we can boldly assume that both H and J can be transformed into the form of Lagrangian Submanifolds..."
The PPT slides on the big screen kept changing.
The entire hall was silent. Apart from the alternating voices of Katerina and Xie Kefu, the only other sound was