The heated discussion was not confined to the mathematics community.
With the crash of arXiv's servers, news that the ABC Conjecture had been proved quickly spread from the mathematics community to universities everywhere, then across the entire internet.
In less than a day, whether on Weibo or Twitter, in QQ groups, on Moments, or on Facebook, almost everyone was discussing it.
"I heard the ABC Conjecture's been solved?"
"What? Solved?! What's going on?"
"How could it happen so fast! You must have heard wrong!"
"No... it looks like it's true. I heard the ISPM Research Group did it-the team led by Academician Lu. They uploaded the preprint to arXiv yesterday, and it took arXiv down for an entire day."
"Aaah! So that's why I couldn't get onto arXiv yesterday! I was wondering why I kept getting 'not found' no matter how long I tried. I thought it had been blocked by the firewall. I'm a goddamn computer science student-I got caught in the crossfire!"
"Holy shit, one paper crashed an entire repository, and it was only a preprint! Is it really that amazing?"
"It probably wouldn't happen with anyone else. Most preprints aren't that useful as references, after all, so people prefer to wait for the polished version to appear in a journal. But Academician Lu put this paper together... judging by past experience, there's barely any difference between his preprints and the papers he formally submits to journals."
"Wait, if the ABC Conjecture's been solved, does that mean we can answer the question that extraterrestrial civilization asked?"
"Looks like it... I bet the second conversation with the extraterrestrial civilization is already being arranged!"
Everyone remembered the press conference half a month earlier, as well as the recorded conversation the spokesperson for Hua Nation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs had released