While Lu Zhou and his young apprentice happily enjoyed their meal, neither knew that the auditorium next door was in utter chaos.
The scholars, normally so refined and composed, were now swarming toward the front of the auditorium like sharks that had caught the scent of blood.
Even if they accounted for only half the attendees, that was still a considerable number.
When Dean Qin realized the situation was gradually getting out of control, he had no choice but to ask the personnel responsible for security to intervene before a stampede broke out.
These people were not university employees. Apparently, they had been dispatched by some security agency.
With their intervention, the situation was soon brought under control.
Then Dean Qin led a group of staff in security uniforms into the crowd and "wrested" the whiteboard covered in equations from the scholars.
Only after seeing that the whiteboard had been preserved without so much as a scratch did Dean Qin breathe a sigh of relief.
He was not particularly worried about which mathematician might get trampled by whom. Apart from a few leading figures in Chinese academia, he did not really know any of them anyway.
The whiteboard, however, was practically a historical artifact. If it was damaged, or the writing on it was smudged, the loss to the Jin University School of Mathematics would be enormous...
Less than ten minutes after the presentation ended.
Discussion of the presentation on MathOverflow had already gone through the roof.
And what drove the topic to even greater heights was a new post by Tarry Tao.
[This was the most brilliant presentation I have attended in three years... the last was at the International Congress of Mathematicians. It was an honor to witness the proof of the quasi-Riemann hypothesis. We are one