He was going straight to holding a lecture!
What a badass!
Was he saying, "I'm not changing a damn thing. What are you going to do about it?"
The regulars on MathOverflow were all people in the field. Many might not have been as formidable as Terry.Tao, but they were still scholars with some standing in their respective specialties.
An author this defiant was someone they had never seen before-or even heard of.
Especially since the announcement came just three days after the juicy news of the rejection, plenty of people had already started imagining what had happened between the two mathematical heavyweights, Lu Zhou and Faltings, over those three days.
[Is he going head-to-head with Faltings?]
[Looks like he's dragging Mathematical Annals into it too.]
[Surely not. Professor Lu used to work as a part-time editor at Mathematical Annals, and he often reviews papers for them. He wouldn't fall out with them over something this minor.]
[Maybe it's just an academic exchange?]
[I've already registered! My hotel in Jinling City and my flight are booked! I have a feeling this lecture is going to be spectacular!]
[Will they come to blows? I bet one dollar Professor Lu wins. (smirk)]
[Come on, we don't even know whether Professor Faltings will accept the invitation. But I agree with the person above: scholars in analytic number theory especially can't afford to miss this lecture. Regardless of who's right, attending one lecture by a heavyweight like this is worth at least six months of reading papers.]
[You probably don't know this, but the Jinling University School of Mathematics website has practically crashed. Tickets on Amazon have been scalped up to $1,000 apiece.]
[WTF?!]
In fact, barely an hour after the Jinling University School of Mathematics posted the announcement, the surge in traffic had