"Hey! Have you heard? Apparently, Hua Nation's mathematics community is making a major move!"
"...What major move?"
"I heard it from a new international student. Apparently, their Ministry of Science and Technology issued a document offering a hundred million in research funding for the ABC Conjecture..."
"Pfft-how much?! A hundred million!? In Zimbabwean dollars?"
"Of course it's in their own currency... Apparently, a lot of their number theorists have gone crazy! Public institutions are poaching people like mad, offering high salaries to anyone who studies number theory. Haven't quite a few Chinese mathematicians here at Princeton recently accepted offers and returned to Hua Nation? Supposedly, it has something to do with this rumor."
"The ABC Conjecture... A hundred million... That's insane. Absolutely insane."
A café at Princeton.
As one of the mathematics community's best-known hubs for gossip, it was always full of strange rumors about the field.
One of the hottest recent topics was probably the internal document suddenly issued by Hua Nation's Ministry of Science and Technology. Anyone sitting there would see people discussing it in hushed voices, envy written all over their faces.
A hundred million in research funding...
They could not even imagine how they would spend that much money. Probably only the titans at the pinnacle of academia, who no longer cared about worldly wealth, could remain unmoved.
There were several versions of the rumor explaining where that hundred million had come from, but most of the explanations were rather far-fetched.
After all, the whole affair was rather incredible in itself.
Everyone was baffled. They could not understand why Hua Nation had suddenly taken such an interest in a purely mathematical problem, even offering a reward so staggering that it left them speechless.
So much so that quite a few foreign number theorists working at Hua