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Chapter 113: Chapter 110: Su Qiwang’s Shock

Brown University, Department of Applied Mathematics office.

Su Qiwang pushed open the office door and walked in, looking slightly weary.

He was a chaired professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Brown University and a top-tier, world-renowned authority in the field of computational mathematics.

He had just finished teaching a two-hour advanced course on ”Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Methods for Partial Differential Equations.”

Shaking his head, he walked over to his desk, sat down, and tossed his lesson plan onto the surface.

’Sigh, the minds of these foreigners just can’t seem to keep up sometimes.’

’And they call themselves Ph.D. students? They can’t even grasp the most basic concepts like numerical flux selection and Runge-Kutta time discretization. I’ve explained it three times, and they’re still stuck on the fundamental logic...’

He complained to himself. If this same course were taught at a university back in his home country...

...even a group of undergraduates—say, the top students from the University of Science and Technology of China or Yan University—would probably be chasing him down by now with more profound, advanced questions about things like nonlinear stability and extremal error estimation.

Although Su Qiwang had studied abroad in his youth and now held the status of a foreign professor, it was a practical necessity. After all, having that status made many things more convenient. But in his bones, he was a man who cared deeply for his motherland.

Over the years, he not only frequently returned to his home country to preside over academic conferences and promote joint training programs between domestic and international universities, but he also went out of his way to mentor young scholars from back home.

Whenever a promising young talent came over, he would always teach them everything he knew, holding nothing back.

’Given the momentum back home, whether these foreigners want to admit it or not, it’s only a matter of time before Huaxia completely catches up and surpasses them in the field of computational mathematics!’

Su Qiwang thought with a sense of gratification. Then, he brewed himself a strong cup of coffee and turned on his computer.

After entering the URL and password, he logged into the editorial backend of *Mathematics of Computation*.

As one of the editors-in-chief for this top-tier journal—considered the pinnacle of the entire computational mathematics world—...

Su Qiwang dedicated a fixed amount of time each day to reviewing manuscripts that had been approved by the preliminary editors and forwarded to him.

How prestigious was *Math. Comp.*?

To put it bluntly, its rejection rate consistently hovered at a daunting 85% to 90%.

This journal’s standards went far beyond filler articles that simply ”ran an existing algorithm on better hardware to get some data.”

If your work didn’t involve an absolute restructuring of the underlying mathematical logic or offer a disruptive theoretical innovation, you couldn’t even get your foot in the door.

Therefore, most opportunistic submissions were weeded out during the initial technical review and plagiarism check. Very few actually made it to the inbox of an editor at Su Qiwang’s level.

The email interface refreshed, and a few new manuscripts that had passed the preliminary screening appeared on the screen.

Su Qiwang clicked on the first few, quickly scanned their abstracts and core algorithm arguments, and then, with a blank expression, issued a ”Desk Reject” decision in the system.

’Completely unoriginal... Daring to submit something that just slightly tweaks the classic Monte Carlo method?’

’Purely a fluff piece on code optimization. It doesn’t even reduce the order of mathematical complexity. You call this innovation?’

He went through several more papers, feeling nothing but a sense of tedium.

Until his eyes fell upon a paper with a rather unremarkable title at the bottom of the list.

”A New Dimensionality Reduction Algorithm for Multipoint Evaluation of the Riemann Zeta Function on the Critical Line.”

’Computation of the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function?’ Su Qiwang raised an eyebrow slightly.

To be honest, this kind of topic was a regular in the world of computational mathematics.

Every year, countless people tried to chip away a piece of this great mountain of number theory.

But in Su Qiwang’s experience, out of a hundred papers on zero computation, ninety-eight were just meaningless parameter optimizations—the same old ideas in a new package. The other two were usually from delusional crackpots trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis.

A title like this usually failed to spark any interest whatsoever.

But this one alone made Su Qiwang pause the mouse hovering over the reject button.

Because the author information section clearly stated:

[Author: Dong Li, Yenching University (Huaxia Yanjing University)]

[Title: Undergraduate]

’Someone from Huaxia? And an undergraduate from Yan University?’

Su Qiwang was taken aback.

In a top-tier journal like *Math. Comp.*, where titans clashed, it had been a very long time since an undergraduate had dared to submit a paper on the fundamental algorithms of the Riemann Zeta function!

Even if one had, it should have been shot down during the preliminary review.

Yet, this manuscript had an astonishingly low plagiarism score of just 1% and had successfully passed the system’s screening.

’Young and fearless. I’m curious to see what an undergraduate from back home can produce these days.’

With a flicker of curiosity and a desire to mentor the next generation, Su Qiwang clicked open the PDF document.

A minute passed.

Ten minutes passed.

An hour passed...

The office was utterly silent.

Only the faint sound of Su Qiwang’s heavy breathing could be heard.

The freshly brewed cup of strong coffee on his desk had long since gone cold.

’He didn’t use the traditional Taylor expansion... He actually replaced the multipoint evaluation of the core rational function entirely with Chebyshev interpolation?’

’Nonlinear FFT grid expansion? Is this a new term?’

’Wait... here he used an iterative splitting identity to completely separate the odd and even indexed terms in the main sum?’

Staring at the lines of exquisitely elegant English-written derivations on the screen, Su Qiwang felt his scalp tingle, a sensation he hadn’t experienced in years.

’This... This bypasses the Odlyzko-Schönhage algorithm entirely...’

As a leading authority in computational mathematics, he understood the significance behind this algorithm far better than the average expert in the field.

’Is this... a complete paradigm-shifting takedown of the existing zero computation framework, starting from pure, fundamental mathematical logic?’

When Su Qiwang scrolled to the final data validation section of the paper, he couldn’t help but rub his eyes, as if he were looking at something that utterly defied common scientific sense.

’On a single mobile workstation... in just four short days...’

’...he fully verified 988,102,445,112 non-trivial zeros?’

Su Qiwang leaned back so abruptly that his chair slid half an inch backward.

If he remembered correctly, back when the French mathematician Xavier Gourdon set the historical record of 10^13, he had used a massive distributed network of PCs, pooling the computational power of countless machines and running them day and night for several months!

’A Precision 7780? I’ve never even heard of this piece of junk mobile workstation...’

’Less than a hundred hours...’

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!

Just then, there was a sudden knock on the office door.

The department’s teaching assistant pushed the door halfway open, poked his head in, and reminded him in a low voice,

”Professor Su, there’s a departmental academic seminar starting soon that you need to attend...”

However, Su Qiwang didn’t say a word, simply waving impatiently at the doorway.

Su Qiwang’s status in Brown University’s Department of Applied Mathematics was that of a titan.

The TA didn’t dare say another word. He quickly and quietly closed the door and hurried off to find someone to chair the meeting in his place.

Time passed once again.

An hour and a half later...

Su Qiwang finally finished reading the paper.

’Is this for real...’

He muttered to himself.

Drawing on his decades of academic expertise, he could certainly see how formidable this dimensionality reduction algorithm was. Every logical derivation, every proof of an error boundary in the paper was flawlessly impeccable.

But in the field of computational mathematics, no matter how beautiful the theory, it only counted if it could produce equally stunning results on a machine.

Verifying nearly a trillion zeros on a single laptop in four days—the result was so good it felt like magic!

His intuition told him this was an absolute algorithmic revolution, but he had to verify it himself!

Su Qiwang found an open-source GitHub link in the ”Data and Code Availability Statement” at the end of the paper.

He quickly downloaded the C++ source code, named ”Riemann_Dimensionality_Reduction,” to his local machine.

Opening the source files, Su Qiwang rapidly inspected the memory pointer deallocation and the FFT library’s calling mechanism.

’The code is clean, the memory reuse mechanism is beautifully written, and there are no logical loopholes...’

After confirming there were no issues with the source code, Su Qiwang dialed the direct line for Brown University’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) Center.

”Hello? This is Su Qiwang from the Department of Applied Mathematics.”

”Get me a supercomputer node cluster with the highest access privileges! Yes, right now! Bump any non-urgent tasks in the queue back for me!”

Hanging up the phone, Su Qiwang finally took a sip of his cold coffee.

If the linear scaling efficiency of this code on a supercomputer was truly as the paper derived...

...then not only was *Math. Comp.* about to receive its greatest masterpiece in recent years, but the entire international computational mathematics community was about to be hit by a magnitude 10 earthquake, all because of this undergraduate from Yan University in Huaxia!