934 An Accident?

Generally, the authors had the habit of splitting their thesis into two or more parts for publication. They would even cite their own theses to increase the number of references. Oftentimes, the editor would ask the author to compile the theses together.

But here, the editor was asking the author to split the theses into two parts…

This was something that was rarely heard of.

“Theorem 1 is one of the core problems in manifold classification and differential topology…” Lu Zhou stared at the email and rubbed his chin. “Sullivan conjecture? The hell is that, I’ve never even heard of it.”

He threw his suitcase aside and went upstairs.

He sat in front of his computer and began searching the database.

Rows upon rows of theses appeared in front of him.

I had no idea.

This conjecture is actually pretty popular.

I don’t recognize any of these people. I guess the Sullivan conjecture isn’t connected to other disciplines, but it’s still an important problem in its own mathematical branch.

This is just like the twin prime conjecture.

No one outside of additive number theory would study that conjecture.

“… Jesus, no wonder it was so difficult. It took me an entire day! It turns out to be an actual mathematics conjecture?”

Basically, the first seven pages of his Annual Mathematics thesis contained the proof of theorem 1. In fact, this theorem proved the Sullivan conjecture for smooth complex manifolds.

This conjecture was about classifying smooth manifolds, and it had been around for more than half a century.

It was one of the core problems in differential topology!

This meant that he solved a half-century-old differential topology problem without knowing it…

After Lu Zhou finished reading the relevant literature, he felt a little shocked.

He was shocked at how nutty he was, but he was also shocked by Professor Chen.

Somehow, Professor Chen was able to connect the hyperelliptic curve analysis method with a classical conjecture in differential topology.

“Regardless… If the Sullivan conjecture is true, then the hyperelliptic curve analysis method can be applied to differentiable manifolds.

“I feel like I took another step forward to solving Riemann’s hypothesis.

“I just don’t know how many more steps it will take…”

Lu Zhou looked at the computer screen and opened his original thesis. He began reformatting the content.

This part was quite simple. He just had to take out the theorem 1 proof from his original thesis, write a few lines of abstract, and submit it as an independent paper.

Professor Frakes even wrote the thesis title for him.

[Proof of Sullivan’s Conjecture on Smooth Complex Perfect Manifolds]

As for his original thesis, he just had to add a reference to this new thesis.

After ten minutes or so, Lu Zhou sent the reformatted theses to Professor Frakes’ email.

After that, Lu Zhou was about to send an email to Professor Chen Yang. However, he suddenly remembered that he previously uploaded a preprint to arXiv.

Even though he rarely made edits to his manuscript, it was common practice in academia to also change the arXiv preprints when making new modifications.

Lu Zhou logged onto his arXiv account and was about to upload a new version of the thesis. However, he was shocked by the number of downloads.

22,000 downloads!

“Jesus Christ, it’s only been two days! Is there really that many downloads?!”

Normally speaking, a well-written thesis in a popular area of research would have a couple hundred downloads at most.

Theses that had tens of thousands of downloads were theses in popular research fields that had been uploaded a long time ago.

Differential topology wasn’t a popular branch of mathematics at all, especially when it came to manifold classification. There were less than 20,000 scholars in the world in this area of study.

Therefore, the number of downloads was a bit abnormal.

There was only one possibility.

Which was that his thesis caused a commotion in other branches of mathematics.

His thesis was so popular that scholars in other areas of research were curious…

Lu Zhou suddenly realized something, and he immediately logged onto his Mathoverflow account.

Just like he had expected, people on this world-renowned mathematics forum began talking about his thesis on the front page…

[Jesus, did anyone see Professor Lu’s latest work?]

[I just read it, it’s just a corollary to the hyperelliptic curve analysis method… What’s so special?]

[That’s not the main point! Have you read theorem 1! People outside of differential topology might not know this, but this is another form of the Sullivan conjecture!]

[My friend has a master’s degree in differential topology, he said that his supervisor was working on differentiable manifold classification. I asked about his opinion, and he said this thesis is the real deal.]

[Professor Lu really is amazing, how does he casually produce such amazing research results.]

[I feel like I wasted my time learning differentiable manifolds…]

[Perfect, I’ll use this as a topic for my discussion class tomorrow.]

After reading the forum posts, Lu Zhou sighed.

“These people are so boring.”

Why don’t they use their time to research something themselves?

It’s just some random conjecture…

What’s the big deal…

Lu Zhou closed his browser and placed his laptop aside.

Annual Mathematics was going to find a qualified reviewer for the peer-review process.

What he had to do now, was to prepare for his trip to Shanghai…