It was probably early in the year, before Lu Zhou had poached Chen Yang from Yanshan University's Mathematics Center, that Professor Chen had begun studying the Hodge Conjecture.
Lu Zhou still remembered how Chen Yang had studied his own Hyperelliptic Curve Analysis Method on the blackboard. Using an exceptionally clever approach, Chen Yang had refined this mathematical tool, originally designed for the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis, and applied it directly to the algebraic topology of nonsingular Complex Algebraic Varieties, as well as the geometric relations expressed by the polynomial equations defining their subvarieties.
It was precisely that brilliant move that had made Lu Zhou appreciate Chen Yang's talent and poach him from Yanshan University's Mathematics Center to Jinling.
Nearly a year had passed, yet there had been no progress whatsoever on the Hodge Conjecture. On top of that, Lu Zhou had been busy with the Unified Theory of Algebra and Geometry for some time, to the point that he had nearly forgotten about it.
"Come on, let's talk in my office."
After bringing Chen Yang to his office, Lu Zhou personally dragged over a whiteboard from the corner and handed him a marker.
Rather than wasting time on pleasantries, Chen Yang took the marker, stood before the whiteboard, and pondered for a moment. He first casually drew a circle, labeled it S beside it, and wrote down an expression.
"...For a compact boundaryless surface S, its Gaussian Curvature K can be integrated over the entire surface."
As he wrote, Chen Yang continued.
"As everyone knows, a surface does not necessarily admit only one metric, so I tried changing the metric on S. After changing the metric, the corresponding Gaussian Curvature K also changes. However, the value of the integral is unrelated to the surface's metric and depends only on its Euler Characteristic