Line 11 on page 17?!
Terence Tao froze for a moment.
Not only Terence Tao, but also Professor Deligne, who sat nearby, Molina, and even Scholze, who was chewing gum in a corner, looked surprised.
"I thought the problem was with equation 6 on line 5 of page 21..."
Muttering to himself, Scholze took out the handwritten notes he carried with him, quickly scribbled a few mathematical symbols only he could understand with a ballpoint pen, and rapidly worked through the calculations in his head.
"Line 5 on page 21?" Aksay Venkatesh, sitting beside Scholze with his arms folded, glanced at him. After a moment's thought, he said with a peculiar expression, "I thought the problem was on line 11 of page 31."
Like Scholze, Aksay was also a prodigy.
Aside from his outstanding academic achievements in representation theory and number theory, he was also the only Australian to have won medals in both the International Physics Olympiad and the International Mathematical Olympiad...
And he had been only twelve that year.
Hearing this, Scholze pulled a crumpled stack of paper from his pocket. He turned to page 31, glanced at it, and raised his eyebrows with interest.
"It seems our Professor Lu has more than a few problems on his hands."
Aksay said nothing. His arms remained folded as he slowly closed his eyes.
Three different scholars had found three entirely different problems in the same proof.
This was no longer simply a flaw in the central argument. There were systemic problems throughout the proof, like a piece of code that produced nothing but errors when run.
Although he felt sorry for the genius who had shared the Fields Medal podium with him, there was nothing to be done.
People had to pay a price for their youth and arrogance.