Orion Crest, Series_1

Chapter 108: Time for a cup of coffee

　　A cup of coffee is enough time for a lot to happen.

　　Just as Orion returned to his bed and lay flat on his back, his consciousness entering system space, Andrew-Granville, a British mathematician at the University of Montreal in Canada, thousands of kilometres from Princeton, was browsing the pages of Arxiv.

　　It's one of the things he must do every day, sometimes after his morning run, sometimes before bed.

　　While most professors like to leave the job of keeping up with the latest research developments of their peers on Arxiv to the PhD students in their labs, Granville likes to take a hands-on approach to the matter.

　　Although the quality of the papers on Arxiv that had not been peer-reviewed varied, many of the newcomers had come up with some highly creative ideas that were nonetheless very inspiring ...... just not perfect yet.

　　After roughly reading about ten papers, Granville yawned and was about to get up and go to bed.

　　Just then, however, his personal page, suddenly received an alert from the website, and it happened to be from the two tags he was following - Analytic Number Theory as well as the Prime Number Problem.

　　Granville frowned and clicked on the alert.

　　Upon seeing the title of the article, however, the corners of his mouth quirked.

　　"Any Even Number Greater Than 2 Can Be Expressed as the Sum of Two Prime Numbers.

　　Wasn't this the Euler statement of Goldbach's Conjecture?

　　Normally, this kind of paper would be thrown into the "General Maths" section, which he had already blocked.

　　Granville didn't know why this paper triggered the alert, but thought it was probably a bug in the website or an oversight by the staff.

　　Shaking his head, just as he was about to close his laptop and go to bed, he suddenly noticed the name of the contributor.

　　Then ......

　　He froze.

　　Orion crest?

　　Winner of last year's Cole Prize in Number Theory?

　　Prover of Zhou's conjecture, the twin prime conjecture, and Polignac's conjecture?

　　This paper means ...... this year he proved the Goldbach conjecture again?

　　WTF?

　　Granville was instantly confused and instantly awake!

　　The original sleepiness was swept away, but he didn't move, instead he sat in his chair in a daze for as long as half a minute.

　　Immediately afterwards he glanced at the calendar to confirm that it was already May, not the first of April.

　　The paper was over fifty pages long, but that was nothing compared to the amount of information contained in the title.

　　"I can't believe that Goldbach's Conjecture has been solved ...... This is impossible."

　　Whispering in his mouth, Granville clicked on the thesis and followed the abstract of the thesis, reading down line by line.

　　Then, this paper, he then read all night ......

　　......

　　On the other hand, far across the Atlantic, at the École normale supérieure, ENS, a lecture on the proof of the Weak Goldbach Conjecture was being given.