For a mathematics community starved of gossip, any progress on the Riemann Hypothesis would be eagerly discussed for quite some time.
The same was true for the Mathematics Department at the Berkeley campus in Los Angeles, a holy land of mathematics on the West Coast.
The moment the preprint of Professor Lu's paper appeared on arXiv, news that the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis had been proved spread everywhere. Sit down in any café, and one could hear people excitedly discussing this century-old problem.
"Have you heard? The Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis has been proved!"
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"I just heard about it. It's unbelievable—no one has managed to shift the right boundary of the critical strip even the slightest bit to the left in an entire century!"
"The last line of research in this direction directly led to the proof of the Prime Number Theorem. I wonder what Professor Lu will bring us this time."
"Ah, if only I had half of Professor Lu's intelligence."
"Wake up. Stop dreaming!"
It was not just the students of the Berkeley campus Mathematics Department. The professors were discussing it as well.
Although Analytic Number Theory was not a strong field at the Berkeley campus, which leaned more toward Partial Differential Equations, a scholar like Terence Tao, who was proficient in almost every field, naturally would not miss such major news in Mathematics.
In an office at the Berkeley campus Mathematics Department, Terence Tao sat before a desk piled with draft paper, spinning a ballpoint pen in his hand as he frowned at a densely written sheet on the desk. He was so focused that he did not even hear the knock at the door behind him.
The knocking continued for a while before the door was pushed open. A tall, thin Asian man entered carrying a box