What happened abroad, of course, couldn't affect the children in their ivory tower.
Qiao Ze maintained his consistent efficiency.
On the last day of August, at five in the afternoon, he completed his research paper.
Then, following Li Jiangao's recommendation, Qiao Ze submitted it directly to Princeton's "Mathematics Annual".
Qiao Ze, already experienced in submitting papers, filled out the necessary information with ease and sent out the paper. As usual, he gave the second authorship to Li Jiangao and the third to Liu Chenfeng.
He wasn't worried about any trouble with such purely academic articles and felt everyone liked being listed as second or third authors. Thus, as long as they made some contribution to the project, Qiao Ze was willing to add their names.
As for the corresponding author and first author, those were naturally his own.
He didn't reserve the corresponding author spot for Li Jiangao because first, Qiao Ze didn't think this paper was very valuable, and second, according to Li Jiangao, the paper was intended as a starting point for further discussions. He wanted to keep his own email to continue in-depth discussions with other interested scholars.
If he had left Li Jiangao's email, it would have been a hassle to forward messages back and forth and a waste of everyone's time.
After completing these steps, Qiao Ze calmly sat in his seat and zoned out for a while.
In fact, he still felt somewhat unaccustomed.
He thought the project was just starting when his mentor told him it could already be concluded.
Qiao Ze began to consider whether he should just make his unify research the next project to maintain continuity.
It wasn't about the paltry research funds granted by the university.
But with a university project to occupy him, Dean Xu, who was otherwise very idle, would not come to chat with him every few days.
Su Mucheng, sitting beside him, sensed the change in Qiao Ze's demeanor. She glanced at his computer screen and said with a touch of joy, "Qiao, you finished the paper?"
"Congratulations, Qiao. Should we celebrate today?"
Qiao Ze thought for a moment, then shook his head, "Let's wait until it gets published."
Mainly because he didn't feel there was much to celebrate.
If he celebrated after completing every simple project, he would have to do so several times a month.
"Oh, okay." Su Mucheng nodded and then added, "It's bound to be published directly. After all, you are not an unknown person now."
"Hopefully," Qiao Ze replied simply.
In his view, whether a paper got published smoothly wasn't just about the quality of the paper but also depended on whether the reviewers were thinking straight.
The likelihood of encountering another reviewer with a skewed perspective still existed.
The United States, New Jersey, Princeton town on the Delaware Plain.
The scenery here was beautiful, but this was often overlooked by the outside world.
Because the world-renowned centers for mathematics, Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, were both located here.
"Mathematics Annual" was also operated jointly by these two institutions.
If the editors of "Mathematics Annual" were to become aware of Qiao Ze's thoughts, they would likely immediately blacklist him from submitting because "Mathematics Annual" was known for its rich academic resources and high-level review team.
Not to mention the journal maintained a strict selection policy, publishing only seventy to eighty papers each year, or even less.
So, mathematicians without substantial credentials rarely sent their work to such journals.
If it had been two months earlier and Qiao Ze had rashly submitted the paper with his name as the corresponding author, as Li Jian had said, it would likely have been glanced at by the editor and tossed straight into the trash bin. But this couldn't be blamed on the editors of top-tier journals.
The more prestigious the journal, the more extreme the polarization of submissions they received.
Mid-level mathematicians didn't dare to submit, but low-level mathematicians or even those with superficial mathematical knowledge often did—and with great confidence too.
If these top-tier journal editors were to publish all the papers they discarded each year into a volume of bizarre papers, it would be astonishing to find that the Goldbach Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis, and the NP-problem get "proved" dozens or hundreds of times every year by various "mathematicians" with wildly imaginative approaches.
If expanded to the realm of theoretical physics, principles like relativity, the uncertainty principle, and even Newton's classic laws get disproved countless times every year by hidden geniuses around the globe.
The most bizarre were the plethora of new academic terms and concepts created in these papers.
For instance, the "mass gap" problem, which Qiao Ze was so eager to resolve, had already been clearly demonstrated by someone using philosophical research methodologies.
Even though the theories in the papers hadn't been validated by any experiments, one had to admit that the added esoteric content often made them seem logically self-consistent.
Reading one or two such papers might be interesting,
but after a while, they really can make your brain feel like it's being gnawed on by a dog.
So as things evolved, in an era when anyone could knock on the literary door, editors who had a few months of experience soon mastered the gist of reviewing the author and the institution first.
If the name wasn't from a well-known university or research institute and was unheard of, it was almost certain that ninety-nine point nine nine percent of such submissions could be passed over without error.
Nobody had the energy to continuously sift gold from dung.
Fortunately, as Su Mucheng had said, Qiao Ze was now quite renowned and had caught the attention of many professors within Princeton University.