Hilbert once said that if he were fortunate enough to awaken from his eternal slumber five hundred years later, his first question would be whether the Riemann hypothesis had been solved.
Whether or not Lu Zhou was in the mood for interviews, the moment that bottle of champagne was opened, the entire mathematics community was rocked by the presentation that had just concluded.
The Riemann hypothesis had been solved!
Good grief, he had already knocked out three of the seven Millennium Problems!
And this one was especially important...
If Polignac's conjecture, the Goldbach conjecture, and the quasi-Riemann hypothesis had, at most, placed Professor Lu on the throne of mathematics, then the Millennium Problem concerning the Navier-Stokes equations had crowned him with a halo, casting its light into the neighboring world of physics.
His proof of the Riemann hypothesis, meanwhile, had sent him straight from the ground into the heavens, elevating him to godhood!
The analogy might not have been entirely appropriate, but it was hardly an exaggeration.
Although the mathematics community had yet to give a definitive response endorsing the proof Lu Zhou had presented during his sixty-minute lecture, the relatively mild questions from the leading mathematicians present, along with his fluent answers, made that outcome seem almost inevitable.
Even if the paper ultimately contained a few flaws or minor issues, those could be corrected before formal publication. After opening the champagne at his own presentation, Wiles had spent over a year revising his paper before finally turning Fermat's conjecture into Fermat's last theorem.
Although the mathematics community could be ruthlessly pragmatic when a claimed proof was deemed a failure, it often displayed extraordinary patience when faced with a proposition of such importance.
After all, they had already waited a century and a half.
A few more days, months, or