Home / My Study Chat Group is Full of Real Big Shots / Chapter 170 - 166: This Isn’t Scientific

Read free on Ficlyn

My Study Chat Group is Full of Real Big Shots

Chapter 170 - 166: This Isn’t Scientific · Nov 03, 2026

Prev Chapter Novel Info Next Chapter

Chapter List (387)

Page number / 8

151 Chapter 151 - 149: Reject My Paper 2026-11-03
152 Chapter 152 - 150: This Kid’s Got a Nasty Streak 2026-11-03
153 Chapter 153 - 151: You’re Trying to Lure Him to Yan University? 2026-11-03
154 Chapter 154 - 152: Something Big is About to Happen in the World of Mathematics 2026-11-03
155 Chapter 155 - 153: Seriously? Are International Journals This Intense? 2026-11-03
156 Chapter 156 - 154: Your Way of Thinking Is a Bit Like Those 19th-Century Masters 2026-11-03
157 Chapter 157 - 154: Your Approach Is a Bit Like the 19th-Century Masters 2026-11-03
158 Chapter 158 - 155: How About Bringing Old Yang Along? 2026-11-03
159 Chapter 159 - 156: The Terms Must Still Be Negotiated 2026-11-03
160 Chapter 160 - 157: Academic Atmosphere 2026-11-03
161 Chapter 161 - 157: Academic Atmosphere 2 2026-11-03
162 Chapter 162 - 158: The Commanding National Power Equipment 2026-11-03
163 Chapter 163 - 159: Long-term Academic Visit 2026-11-03
164 Chapter 164 - 160: Manuscript Decision 2026-11-03
165 Chapter 165 - 161: John Charles Fields 2026-11-03
166 Chapter 166 - 162: How About I Poach Viteng for You? 2026-11-03
167 Chapter 167 - 163: The Ceiling Among Peers 2026-11-03
168 Chapter 168 - 164: Feeling a Little Stupid 2026-11-03
169 Chapter 169 - 165: He Should Be a Little More Awesome 2026-11-03
170 Chapter 170 - 166: This Isn’t Scientific 2026-11-03
171 Chapter 171 - 167: The Value of 2/5 of a Newton 2026-11-03
172 Chapter 172 - 167: The Worth of 2/5 of a Newton (Part 2) 2026-11-03
173 Chapter 173 - 168: Life Science Origin Fragment 2026-11-03
174 Chapter 174 - 169: Teacher Yang, Let’s Do Research Together 2026-11-03
175 Chapter 175 - 170: Special Support Plan 2026-11-03
176 Chapter 176 - 171: Can You Do Me a Favor? 2026-11-03
177 Chapter 177 - 172: You Don’t Study Math, You Don’t Know His Terror 2026-11-03
178 Chapter 178 - 173: And You Will Also Surpass Me 2026-11-03
179 Chapter 179 - 174: The Key 2026-11-03
180 Chapter 180 - 175: Three Months 2026-11-03
181 Chapter 181 - 176: Sometimes, Being Too Outstanding Is Not Always a Good Thing 2026-11-03
182 Chapter 182 - 177: Li Dong, Come On Up 2026-11-03
183 Chapter 183 - 178: You’ll Be My Teaching Assistant 2026-11-03
184 Chapter 184 - 179: Do Me a Favor 2026-11-03
185 Chapter 185 - 180: Retribution 2026-11-03
186 Chapter 186 - 181: I’ll Ask for Your Help Next Time 2026-11-03
187 Chapter 187 - 182: Going to the Capital 2026-11-03
188 Chapter 188 - 183: Comment 2026-11-03
189 Chapter 189 - 184: Old Yang Is Really Something 2026-11-03
190 Chapter 190 - 185: Destroy It All, School Is Impossible 2026-11-03
191 Chapter 191 - 186: Want to Play Academic Bully with Me? 2026-11-03
192 Chapter 192 - 187: An Announcement 2026-11-03
193 Chapter 193 - 188: In the Sunlight 2026-11-03
194 Chapter 194 - 190: This Is a Lesson 2026-11-03
195 Chapter 195 - 191: I’m Prepared to Elaborate 2026-11-03
196 Chapter 196 - 192: Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know? 2026-11-03
197 Chapter 197 - 193: Not Yet 40, the Perfect Age to Dare 2026-11-03
198 Chapter 198 - 194: That’s Enough, Teacher Yang 2026-11-03
199 Chapter 199 - 195: Scraps 2026-11-03
200 Chapter 200 - 196: Person Not Found 2026-11-03

Chapter 170: Chapter 166: This Isn’t Scientific

Li Dong stood at the lectern, looking down at the university students whose eyes were filled with a thirst for knowledge. Some of them were already starting to yawn.

’It must be because I was too late,’ he thought, feeling a pang of guilt. ’Everyone’s gotten tired of waiting...’

So, he decided to skip the pleasantries and get right to it.

”Today, I’d like to start by talking about prime numbers.”

Li Dong wrote a string of numbers on the whiteboard behind him: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11... 23, 29...

”These are all prime numbers.”

”They can only be divided by 1 and themselves. In the world of integers, they’re the most stubborn bunch.”

A few soft chuckles rippled through the audience.

”But the question is, how are they distributed?”

Li Dong looked at the audience.

”Look at this string of numbers. 2 and 3 are right next to each other, and 3 and 5 are very close too. But between 23 and 29, the gap suddenly widens to six.”

”As we go further, the gaps between primes become larger and more erratic.”

”It’s as if God casually scattered a handful of beans—some places dense, some places sparse, seemingly without any pattern.”

He paused.

”But is there truly no pattern at all?”

Li Dong wrote a function on the whiteboard.

ζ(s)=Σ 1/nˢ

”In 1859, Riemann told us that the secret to the distribution of prime numbers is hidden within the zeros of this function.”

”This function is called the Riemann zeta function.”

He pointed at the summation symbol.

”Its definition is very simple: just sum the reciprocals of all positive integers raised to the power of s. It’s addition so simple even a grade-schooler could understand it.”

”And yet, this simple sum has tormented the entire mathematical world for over one hundred and sixty years.”

The graduate students in the audience began to nod repeatedly.

They had all encountered this material before, but Li Dong’s explanation was just so accessible.

Instead of immediately bombarding them with a wall of symbols, he laid out the problem as clearly as if he were telling a story.

A graduate student, sitting toward the middle of the auditorium, whispered to the person beside him.

”Hey, I think he’s explaining this really well.”

”This guy’s the real deal.”

The surrounding undergraduates who were just auditing the class were also surprised.

’Huh? Maybe... this isn’t so hard after all?’

Even Lin Xue, sitting in the third row, thought to herself, ’Hey, I think I can actually understand this.’

Li Dong, on stage, looked at the receptive faces in the audience and felt a warm glow inside.

It wasn’t like at Seventh Middle School, where the students would just stare at him with dead eyes whenever he explained a math problem.

’Zhejiang University really is a great school,’ he thought.

His confidence surged, and he started to delve deeper into the topic.

”Alright, since we’re on the topic of the zeta function’s zeros, let’s talk about what those zeros actually look like.”

Li Dong drew a vertical dashed line on the whiteboard.

”This is the critical line, Re(s) = 1/2.”

”The Riemann Hypothesis states that all non-trivial zeros of the zeta function lie on this line.”

He dotted a few points on the dashed line.

”The first zero is located at imaginary part 14.134..., the second at 21.022..., the third at 25.010...”

”To date, the most handsome person alive has verified the first 10²³ non-trivial zeros.”

Li Dong ignored the whispers from the audience calling him shameless and continued.

”That’s an astronomical number—a one followed by twenty-three zeros—and every single one of them falls obediently on this line. Not one of them has wandered off.”

He paused for a moment here.

”But have you ever considered a deeper question?”

”We know these zeros lie on the line.”

”But what about the distribution of the gaps between them?”

”The gap between 14.134 and 21.022 is about 6.9, while the gap between 21.022 and 25.010 is only about 4... Is there some statistical law governing these spacings?”

Li Dong spoke at a measured pace, but every sentence was a hook, reeling in the audience’s attention.

”In 1973, Montgomery provided an answer.”

He wrote the definition of the pair correlation function on the whiteboard.

The expression for F_T(α), the weight function w(u) = 4/(4+u²), the normalization process...

”Montgomery proved that for |α|

”What does this mean?”

Seeing that no one in the audience spoke, Li Dong continued.

”It means that the distribution of prime numbers and the distribution of particle energy levels in quantum physics follow the same mathematical law.”

”God used the same hand to scatter both sets of beans.”

The auditorium fell silent for two seconds.

Then, for reasons they couldn’t quite explain, several graduate students felt goosebumps prickle their skin.

’Prime numbers and quantum mechanics? The same hand?’

They were starting to wonder if God might actually exist...

The undergraduates were starting to get lost, but they couldn’t help but feel... they had to keep listening.

A few even secretly pulled out their phones and started recording.

Li Dong didn’t notice any of this. He was completely lost in the joy of teaching.

He pressed on, now completely forgetting Professor Cai Tianxin’s advice: ”Don’t go too deep...”

”Montgomery proved the case for |α|

”For fifty-three long years, number theorists the world over have thrown themselves at this problem, yet none have managed to break past this theoretical impasse.”

”But I did.”

He said it plainly, with no intention of showing off. He was simply informing these graduate students—most of them older than him—of the latest cutting-edge results.

But some in the audience who were unaware of the context gasped, unsure for a moment whether to believe him.

Of course, those who had seen the paper on arXiv knew it was almost certainly true. After all, not a single major figure in the field had come forward to call it nonsense.

Li Dong started writing formulas on the whiteboard.

”My proof is divided into four parts.”

Starting with the Riemann explicit formula, he deconstructed the contributions of the zeros and the prime powers term by term.

...

Line after line of formulas filled the board.

Each step of the derivation was clean and efficient, with no extraneous symbols or redundant calculations.

Then he began to discuss the interval of |α| from 2 to 3 and the contribution of prime squares.

Then, for the interval from 3 to 4, the contribution of prime cubes combined with a Fourier optimization framework...

By this point, the audience had begun to split.

The undergraduates were completely lost, but strangely, not a single one of them left.

They were having an experience unlike any other.

Even though they couldn’t understand the meaning of each symbol, they could feel the rhythm flowing between the formulas.

They couldn’t bring themselves to leave!

Because humanity had spent a hundred and sixty years just to touch the edge of this problem.

And now, this young man on stage, not even twenty years old, was sketching it out for them with a piece of chalk.

The graduate students were still holding on.

They could follow about seventy percent of the derivation. While some of the leaps in logic would require further thought later, they were able to grasp the overall framework.

But the more they grasped, the more shocked they were.

Because Li Dong’s train of thought...

...was something they had never even conceived of.

Sitting in the first row, Cai Tianxin and Xu Hongwei glanced at each other, both seeing deep surprise in the other’s eyes.

They had read the paper Li Dong posted on arXiv about Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association.

It wasn’t just them; many of the top mathematics professors in the country had read it.

And they all thought they had understood it.

But now, listening to Li Dong explain it...

...it seemed they hadn’t truly understood it at all.

How could one describe the feeling?

It was as if the result was the same, the destination identical.

But the path taken was completely different.

When modern number theorists read the paper, it was like taking a high-speed train to the destination.

The scenery flashed by, every stop was predictable, and the arrival was on schedule.

But the line of thought Li Dong was presenting on stage today...

...was like riding in a horse-drawn carriage.

He was using the methods of the nineteenth-century masters.

Riemann’s explicit formula, Chebyshev’s estimations, the Hardy-Littlewood circle method...

All of them were the most classic, most foundational tools of number theory.

No safety net from the theory of automorphic forms, no technical shortcuts from spectral decomposition, not even any of the sieve method variations developed in the twenty-first century.

It was all just brute-force calculation.

But the problem was...

...his horse-drawn carriage was faster than a high-speed train.

Because it wasn’t being pulled by horses.

It was being pulled by a unicorn.

Modern methods were developed precisely because classical methods had run out of steam.

The remainder terms were uncontrollable, the estimates weren’t precise enough, and ultimately, one had to resort to more abstract, higher-dimensional algebraic tools to circumvent the obstacles.

It was like building a high-speed railway: when you hit a mountain, you dig a tunnel; when you cross a river, you build a bridge.

It consumed immense time and resources, but at least it got you to your destination.

Classical methods, on the other hand, were like a horse-drawn carriage on an old road. You had to go over any mountains and wade through any rivers.

It was too slow and too exhausting, so everyone abandoned it.

But Li Dong’s carriage could fly...

How do you even argue with that?

Mountains? Rivers? They might as well not have existed. It just flew right over them.

And that was what truly shocked Cai Tianxin and Xu Hongwei.

It wasn’t that Li Dong had used classical methods to achieve a result that modern methods could not.

It was that Li Dong had made classical methods themselves radiate a power they should not possess.

It wasn’t logical.

But that’s exactly what was happening.

This was the part they hadn’t truly grasped from the paper.

A path everyone had thought was a dead end for ages.

Li Dong hadn’t just walked it; he had turned it into a breathtaking spectacle.

Xu Hongwei took a deep breath and glanced at Guan Yi in the third row.

Guan Yi’s expression was calm.

But Xu Hongwei knew his student.

That calm wasn’t composure.

It was the stillness of being utterly stunned.

...

「On the other side of the world.」

Late at night, Arthur Penrose sat on his sofa at home, watching a livestream on his phone.

Liu Ruochuan had told him in advance that Li Dong was giving a public lecture at Zhejiang University and asked if he wanted to watch it remotely.

Penrose had immediately said, ”Of course.”

Now, he was muttering to himself.

”Yes... yes, that’s it. It’s the exact same feeling...”

”I had this same feeling when I listened to his report at the ICCM...”

”This train of thought... it’s so much like the nineteenth-century masters.”

He recalled how he felt the first time he read Li Dong’s paper. The feeling had been strange. The conclusion was correct, and the derivation was rigorous, but something had always felt... different.

Not that it was wrong, but... the style.

”Incredible.”

Penrose said softly.

Then he picked up his phone and sent a message to someone far away in Los Angeles.

”Terry, are you watching the Zhejiang University livestream?”

A reply came a few seconds later.

”Watching now.”

”Thinking the same thing I am?”

”Even more incredible than I imagined.”

Terry sent another message.

”Classical thinking with modern tools. I finally understand how he wrote that paper.”

Penrose smiled.

He was looking forward to his trip to Yan University more and more.

Prev Chapter Novel Info Next Chapter

Recommended Novels

Reincarnation Of The Strongest Sword God Lucky Old Cat

Reborn As Super Heiress Mushuang

Supreme Star Card Master Cloud Camellia

Shadow Slave Guiltythree

Chaotic Sword God Xin Xing Xiao Yao

Inheriting A Divine Cultivation Clan At The Start, All My Juniors Are Empresses Monkey Bread

My Vampire System JKSManga

Gravity Mage with Level-Up System Aravind_S

Versatile Mage Chaos

Martial God Asura Kindhearted Bee

Shadow Slave Guiltythree

Supreme Emptiness Heavenly Overlord

Invincible Shen Jian

Living In Another World With A Farm Ming Yu

Affinity: Chaos Springs_Halo