931 Sullivan Conjecture

When it came to most mathematical journals, the editors didn’t necessarily have a strong academic background. Their job was mainly to check the format and word count of the paper, then contact peer reviewers and make a decision on the reviewers’ comments.

However, not all journals were like this.

The Annual Mathematics journal, founded by Princeton, had editors-in-chief who were big-name mathematicians.

For example, former editor-in-chief Peter Sarnak was a great scholar in the field of number theory. He was also the 2014 winner of the Wolf Prize.

Professor Frakes was the editor-in-chief after Professor Peter Sarnak. Even though he had a weaker reputation, his strength was unquestionable. If he were still under 40 years old, he might be able to win a Fields Medal using his research results on differential manifolds.

Of course, the reason why Annual Mathematics chose him as the editor-in-chief wasn’t purely because of his academic ability; there were many other factors at play.

Because the research on controllable nuclear fusion was rising in popularity, so was research on plasma physics. Due to the application of the “L-manifold” on solving the Navier-Stokes equations and plasma turbulence problems a few years ago, the research on mathematical fields such as partial differential equations and differentiable manifolds had also seen significant growth in popularity.

Ever since Professor Lu’s Navier-Stokes equations report, there hadn’t been any outstanding results produced in the field of partial differential equations and differential manifolds. It was like Professor Lu stole all of the magic from the fields himself.

Therefore, Professor Frakes was chosen as editor-in-chief of Annual Mathematics, mainly due to his expertise in the partial differential equation and differentiable manifolds.

This was because an editor was normally biased toward theses that were in his own area of research…

Princeton.

Annual Mathematics editorial department.

Professor Frakes already moved into his new office, and he was struggling with the mountain of work in front of him.

Even though most editors-in-chief didn’t take their jobs seriously, Frakes was different. He was at most a decent scholar, especially in a place like Princeton, so he was like an invisible man.

Other people had the luxury of not caring about their editor-in-chief position, but he couldn’t. Therefore, he took this job extra seriously, and he even put his research project on hold.

As he sat in front of a computer, one of his PhD students took a sip of coffee and suddenly stared at the computer screen. The student spoke while choking on coffee.

“… Professor, cough! You have a submission letter in your inbox!”

Professor Frakes was busy with other things, so he casually said, “I’ll take a look when I’m free.”

“But… the author is Lu Zhou.”

Professor Frakes stopped typing and stood up. He quickly walked toward the student’s desk.

“Give me the computer!”

“Oh, okay…”

Professor Frakes sat down at the computer and double-checked the email address. After he made sure that Professor Lu was the author, he quickly downloaded the attached thesis.

“Let me see what Professor Lu did this time…”

One of the best perks of being an editor of a well-known journal was being able to read about the latest outstanding research.

Professor Frakes opened the new thesis. He was looking forward to this.

However, when he read the abstract, the excitement in his eyes disappeared. A look of disappointment appeared on his face.

The PhD student said, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s not a new research result, just a supplement to the hyperelliptic curve analysis method.” Professor Frakes shook his head and said, “He’s beating a dead horse, it’s not anything outstanding.”

The student said, “… Are we going to reject the submission?”

“No,” Professor Frakes shook his head and said, “if it’s an important supplementary result, it should be fine… Just leave this to the reviewers. It at least deserves a peer review… Also, print the thesis, I want to have a look.”

“Okay, professor.”

The printer began to rustle.

Soon the thesis was printed.

Professor Frakes returned to his seat with the warm pages. He drank his coffee while reading the thesis.

Honestly, after reading the abstract, he didn’t have any expectations for the thesis.

However, when he got to the third page, he began to mutter to himself.

“… When n is greater than 2, the two n-dimensional complex dimensions intersect X ^ n (d), X ^ n (d ‘), there exists a differential homeomorphism if and only if their Euler number, total degree, and Pontrjagin class are equal.

“Where have I seen this before?”

This conjecture seemed oddly familiar.

It was almost like a different version of another conjecture…

Professor Frakes stood up from his chair and wrote some equations on a piece of draft paper.

After writing down two lines, he froze.

“…”

This…

Is this…

Professor Frakes’s pupils became larger as he stood up from his seat.

“Sullivan conjecture!”

This conjecture was proposed by Professor Sullivan when he was researching the “classification of the simply connected manifolds with limited uncertainty” and “rational homotopy”. It was a conjecture in the field of smooth manifolds.

It was also one of the core problems in differential topology!

People outside of differential topology most likely hadn’t heard of this conjecture. After all, this conjecture wasn’t particularly significant for people in other mathematical branches.

Due to its difficulty, there were very few people researching this problem. Even Frakes, who was a decent scholar in the field of differential topology, couldn’t recognize this problem at first glance.

However, Lu Zhou wasn’t in the field of differential topology at all, and being able to produce a result like this was unheard of…

Judging from the citations, it was clear that Professor Lu didn’t know that his proposition was another form of the Sullivan conjecture.

Professor Frakes was shocked, and his fingers began to tremble.

The PhD student sitting nearby looked at his supervisor and asked, “What’s wrong, professor?”

Frakes ignored his student.

His eyes were locked onto the thesis as he muttered to himself with excitement, “Jesus Christ…

“We found a piece of treasure!”

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