At Least Let Him See the Fusion Battery

In the conference room at the International Mathematical Union secretariat in Berlin, everyone fell silent.

More than sixty phone screens were still lit, yet not a single mathematician spoke.

Freddy stood in the doorway, still holding his phone.

Who was Li Dong?

If he had merely won a Fields Medal, no one here would have paid his words much attention. There were at least twenty Fields Medal winners in the room.

But Li Dong was only twenty-eight. And what had earned him his Fields Medal?

The Li Theorem. What was the Li Theorem?

It was a cornerstone at the very heart of Functoriality in the Langlands Program.

He had proved that deep symmetries in the mathematical world could correspond to one another according to definite rules.

Once such a connection was established, methods and conclusions developed in one area of mathematics could become the basis for progress in another.

That was why the Li Theorem mattered.

Put another way, even if all seven Millennium Problems were solved, they would still be only pieces of the Langlands Program puzzle.

Of course, that did not make them unimportant. A puzzle could not be completed with a piece missing.

But some pieces mattered more than others.

In terms of unifying mathematics, the Li Theorem was arguably more important than even the Riemann Hypothesis or Goldbach Conjecture.

The connections it established would shape how many future problems were studied.

Its importance spoke for itself.

And the Li Conjecture was the eighth problem the Clay Mathematics Institute had put forward this century.

If Li Dong had not been so young, the mathematical community would have dropped the word "young" from "leader of the younger generation of mathematicians" and simply called him a leader of mathematics.

So when he spoke, no one in mathematics dared dismiss