Although he had finally settled on a research approach, solving the problem was no easy task.
A full century had passed since the concept of the Critical Strip was first proposed.
Aside from the earliest and easiest regions to resolve, Re(s)＜0 and Re(s)＞1, it had taken decades to exclude the two regions Re(s)=0 and Re(s)=1.
It was precisely the exclusion of those two regions that had directly led to the later proof of the Prime Number Theorem.
To gain a deeper understanding of the subject, Lu Zhou gathered a vast number of papers. He even dug up electronic editions of the academic works Grothendieck had written to major publishers requesting be taken down, found the earliest version describing the method of Étale Cohomology, and collected every paper Professor Deligne had published while proving the Weil Conjecture.
Lu Zhou should really have finished reading these documents during his doctoral studies. Unfortunately, he had been struggling in the field of Number Theory at the time. Though he had wanted to enter Algebraic Geometry, he simply could not spare the time.
Research into the Goldbach Conjecture had occupied virtually all his energy, while Professor Deligne's cultivation of him had essentially been a hands-off approach that let him develop as he pleased. Of course, if it had not been so, he would not have been able to concentrate his efforts on solving the century-old problem of the Goldbach Conjecture.
All he could say was that there were gains and losses.
On the first day of his retreat, Lu Zhou spent the entire day gathering every paper he could find.
On the third day of his retreat, Lu Zhou spent two days speed-reading all those papers and summarizing their key points.
By the fifth day, combining his previous conjectures regarding methods in Algebraic Geometry with