Chapter 443: Fusion Starts With Superconductivity

It was getting closer and closer to the end of the month. Another huge event happened in the mathematics community, and not only did it spread across the entire academic community, but it even spread beyond academia.

Hardy was sitting in front of his computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, researching information about the conference. When he read a piece of news, he suddenly froze.

In his surprise, he nearly shouted out loud.

“Professor, the Riemann’s conjecture is solved?!”

Lu Zhou: “What?”

It was like Hardy had discovered a new continent when he said excitedly, “I saw it on mathoverflow. It says that Sir Michael Atiyah from Cambridge used a very simple method to solve Riemann’s conjecture, and he will do a presentation at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.”

Mathoverflow was a well-known mathematics website and many nutty mathematicians had accounts on there. For example, Tao Zhexuan was active on the site; not only did he update his blogs, but he would also frequently interact with visitors.

After hearing Hardy, Lu Zhou smiled and said in a half-joking kind of tone, “If he really completed the proof, then he undoubtedly would become this century’s greatest mathematician.”

Hardy asked, “Are you optimistic about his proof?”

Lu Zhou didn’t answer the question directly. Instead, he only gave a simple opinion.

“Sir Atiyah is an outstanding scholar; he’s also a Fields Medal and Abel Prize winner. However, the old man is 89 years old… It’s hard for me to give an accurate opinion.”

In fact, Atiyah wasn’t the first scholar who claimed to have solved the Riemann’s conjecture.

Around 2004, well-known number theory professor De Branges also claimed to have solved the Riemann’s conjecture. This caused quite a sensation at the time, but unfortunately, his proof wasn’t recognized by the mathematics community.

Even before that, English mathematician G. H. Hardy declared to have solved this problem.

Hardy hesitated for a bit before saying, “But… he’s Sir Atiyah, Fields Medal and Abel Prize winner. Would he make a claim like this if he wasn’t fully confident?”

Lu Zhou smiled as he said, “My dear friend Hardy, if you want to become a scholar, then you must remember that awards are only a type of honor, nothing more. In other words, because the mathematics community gave him the awards, he should take extra care in responding to people’s legitimate questions. People that question him shouldn’t be treated as fools.”

Lu Zhou looked at Hardy and paused for a second.

“Rather than the Riemann’s conjecture, I would like to know more about Atiyah’s progress on the non-existent complex 6-sphere.”

Hardy: “… the non-existent complex 6-sphere?”

Lu Zhou nodded and said: “It’s a famous unsolved algebraic topology problem that is related to the K-theory. Although it’s not a Millennium Prize Problem, it is still one of the most important algebraic topology problems. Around 16 years ago, Sir Atiyah gave this proposition a definitive answer. However, his thesis wasn’t satisfactory. Not only was the proof only half a page long, but he even began to talk about the history of mathematics in the fourth section of the thesis…”

Lu Zhou paused for a second and shrugged. He then said, “According to mathoverflow, he hasn’t responded to the doubts about his thesis. Therefore, the academic community is still skeptical about it.”

The thesis on non-existent complex 6-sphere was available on arXiv.

Solving the famous K-theory problem, then within two years, solving one of the most important number theory problems…

Lu Zhou obviously hoped this was real. After all, anyone in the mathematics field had a bit of a hero syndrome.

But this was a nearly ninety-year-old man…

To be honest, he didn’t have much hope.

Mathematics was a discipline for the young, and there was no such thing as old and wise in this field. Once a person got older, their memory and intelligence would decline significantly.

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Therefore, there were very few mathematicians that could produce results that were superior to their younger self.

The final result didn’t matter as long as the old man was happy…

…

Riemann’s conjecture was a very interesting topic. However, it wasn’t Lu Zhou’s main concern.

He set notifications on for any updates regarding the issue and focused his attention back to Fusion Light mission chain.

Designing the stellarator required a huge amount of engineering, and quantum computing technology was still far from being applicable. After taking into account all of the factors, Lu Zhou decided to choose superconducting materials as his next research project.

Honestly, superconducting materials were no piece of cake. However, it was the best matching project in terms of Lu Zhou’s skill set.

Lu Zhou went to meet Connie at the Frick Chemistry Laboratory.

Because of the cooperation project with Pablo Herrero, over the past six months, he had been doing an academic exchange at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had just gotten back last week.

When Lu Zhou saw Connie, he asked, “How is the superconducting materials project going?”

“I can’t give you an accurate answer, but generally, it’s going smooth.” Connie handed Lu Zhou a USB and said, “I’ve written a summary report on the results. It’s in the USB C folder. I was going to send it to your email.”

Lu Zhou took the USB and nodded.

“Understood, I’ll look at it later.”

Connie looked at how serious Lu Zhou was and asked with excitement, “Professor, are you planning to do something?”

Lu Zhou said in a brief manner, “Yeah… Due to various reasons, I have shifted my focus from mathematics onto superconducting materials.”

He obviously wouldn’t tell Connie the real reason.

Lu Zhou told Connie to start working. He then sat in front of his desk and plugged the USB into his computer before he opened the report written by Connie.

He quickly finished reading the report in half an hour and gained a general understanding of the current progress of the research project.

Basically, the Pablo Jarillo Herrero laboratory was focused on researching theory such as enthalpy energy, pseudogap, nematic liquid crystals, etc.

On the other hand, the Jinling Institute of Computational Materials was mainly focused on application-based research. Their business model was to use a large number of experiments to find a way to maintain the concentration of graphene carriers in superconducting materials.

Lu Zhou had to admit that Professor Pablo Herrero was an expert in the graphene field. After receiving the US$10 million research fund from Star Sky Technology, the progress of their research had been increasing exponentially.

With the help from their theoretical progress, the Jinling Institute of Computational Materials and the Sarrot Laboratory had also produced amazing in-progress results.

However, they were still far from the final result.

Lu Zhou looked at the images on the computer screen and thought for a bit. He quickly realized what he needed to do.

He was good at computational materials science and using mathematical methods to find patterns in materials.

Therefore, the first thing he needed to do was to build a reliable mathematical model using the year-long data collected by the three laboratories.

Also, in order to speed up the progress on this project, he needed more hands.

Professor Chirik was a good candidate…