In all honesty, the problem Lu Zhou had given Han Mengqi was partly meant to discourage her.
Although it was an open-ended question that anyone who had studied the field could offer an answer to, answering it was not actually that easy.
That was because it concerned a classic problem involving the Riemann zeta function.
Namely, the conjecture on the transcendence of values at odd positive integers of the Riemann zeta function.
Just as He Changwen had said, this was not something an outsider who had switched fields halfway through could solve.
Unless she was exceptionally gifted, capable of teaching herself the relevant analytic number theory, collecting papers on the Riemann zeta function, and conducting some research of her own...
Then again, if she really was that talented in pure mathematics, taking her on as a student would hardly be a loss for Lu Zhou.
In fact, Lu Zhou had been pondering a question for some time.
The "medal" from an advanced civilization that he had obtained a while ago had revealed something quite important to him.
Just as humanity had been speculating ever since it began exploring space, humans were not alone in this universe. They had even attracted the attention of other advanced civilizations, which had refrained from making contact for some reason.
There were many possible explanations. It could have been the distance separating them, or the other civilization's particular philosophy or social principles. It was even possible that the civilization had already vanished into the river of time, leaving behind nothing but a message from tens of millions of years ago...
Whatever the explanation, the system currently in his possession should contain information about this advanced civilization. It might very well be his only means of learning about it.
As far as he could tell, raising