Time rewound to twenty-seven double-hours earlier.
Wang Qi walked out of his study, thoroughly satisfied, and let out a long sigh.
"Finished." His heart was full of the solid fulfillment that came after labor, but there was no "surprise" to speak of.
This was the Bourbaki school's way. To the Bourbaki school, there was only the natural course of events, never any "unexpected enlightenment."
Many Earth mathematicians had described the Bourbaki school's working style this way—"Their eyes saw only their destination, and they disdained the scenery by the roadside."
Of course, pressing onward toward one's destination was not an erroneous way to work.
But for mathematicians, sometimes the "roadside scenery" was more important than the "destination."
Or rather, the methods discovered while researching a problem could be more meaningful than the problem itself.
The most intuitive examples were Fermat's Last Theorem and Goldbach's Conjecture.
There was no need to mention Goldbach's Conjecture. Take Fermat's Last Theorem, for instance. Fermat's Last Theorem itself had brought about the birth of many mathematical tools. Hilbert's Program bore the shadow of Fermat's Last Theorem, while the ultimate answer to Fermat's Last Theorem, the "Taniyama-Shimura" conjecture, was in turn part of the Langlands Program.
Otherwise, who cared whether, when integer n > 2, the equation x^n + y^n = z^n had positive integer solutions for x, y, and z?
And who cared whether every even number greater than 2 could be written as the sum of two primes?
It was precisely because of this that many mathematicians deeply hated the Bourbaki school, calling it "boring."
But it could not be denied that sometimes, this kind of work was very meaningful as well.
The accumulation of nine volumes of Original Calculation and the knowledge of Earth's history fused together at this moment.
Wang Qi completed the