Roth Dugan hadn't even left Princeton town for Huaxia when he had already arranged today's meeting with Qiao Ze.
This was thanks to the experience of attending Qiao Ze's lecture in Huaxia last time.
It wasn't guaranteed that they'd get to see Qiao Ze just by showing up.
If they didn't arrange it in advance, the youngster might very well come up with various reasons to keep an old-timer like him at bay.
Yes, this guy was truly capable of such a thing.
Even without considering the tradition of honoring the elderly, the academic world had great respect for old-timers like him, especially in Asian countries. Everywhere he went, except Xilin, especially to countries like Dongben and Beixian Island, he didn't need to visit in person to meet with a younger academic.
He just needed to stay in the busiest city, and then a simple phone call would have them scurrying over.
Especially in Dongben, the respect for ranking was clearly defined. The younger generation of scholars could hardly begin independent research without their mentors.
But then again, although Qiao Ze was capricious, Roth Dugan found it understandable.
People with ability often received more tolerance.
Even the old dean, who wouldn't stand for nonsense, learned how to make excuses for the other side after being turned down countless times.
Such as, "This kid is ultimately ambitious; he's just a bit dull by nature, and he has higher standards for communication, or maybe he is really busy..." and so on.
Alright, to put it plainly, his threshold for tolerance was almost raised to no limit when it came to Qiao Ze, ultimately due to a misalignment of supply and demand.
He needed someone who could understand the strange yet immensely useful knowledge in Qiao Ze's mind and even dreamed of whisking away this young scholar, who was excessively young but already held an important position in the academic world, to Princeton.
But Qiao Ze didn't need much of his help.
He even completely ignored the quite substantial resources he could have secured for the youngster.
That's why he could afford to be capricious enough to refuse to meet whenever he didn't feel like it.
Roth Dugan understood this well, and he didn't want to waste the hard-won opportunity to meet, which is why he had decided to talk with Peter Schultz about his thoughts first so he could make full use of the face-to-face communication later on and extract some useful things from Qiao Ze's mind.
This youngster was a real headache.
He didn't even possess the competitive drive typical of young people.
Roth Dugan knew about the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton's little trick of posting research progress on super helical space algebra on the official website.
Any replacement, even an old-timer like himself, would be unable to resist feeling proud to see their original theory discussed and researched globally, prompted by the world's top research institution, and would surely respond.
Even if relations between the two were poor, they would hardly be able to resist showing off to inform them whether their research direction might be flawed, or offering solutions to problems, to prove the invincibility of their own theory.
At least, Roth Dugan, putting himself in Qiao Ze's shoes, believed he would definitely do so, even if it helped the others deepen their understanding of the new theory.
Which theoretical mathematician wouldn't want to see their theory promoted and advanced during their lifetime?
This is the lifelong pursuit of the profession, after all!
But Qiao Ze was truly different.
Roth Dugan didn't even know how the young man had resisted— for a whole season, he had, aside from occasionally publishing a few related problems, never said a word about Princeton's research progress, either in public or private.
He just silently watched a group of scholars discuss the theoretical framework he had already established.
Is this something a normal mathematician would do?
When occasionally communicating with Qiao Ze via video, he had brought up related questions and often subtly asked Qiao Ze what he thought about the research on Princeton's official website, but his queries were always deftly handled by Qiao Ze.
He could even recite by heart Qiao Ze's common responses.
"Not bad," "Worthy of recognition," "Pretty good," "The theorem is very simple..."
This is also why he especially valued this face-to-face interaction with Qiao Ze.
On video, he feared being recorded, which didn't allow him to completely let his guard down.
But with face-to-face interaction, he could temporarily set aside his pride and ask everything he wanted to know.
This was important because Qiao Ze's presentation today had really inspired him; he felt that if he could learn from Qiao Ze, it could greatly simplify the computations for the project he was currently researching.
This was the N-body project.
If he succeeded, perhaps he could train another Fields Medal student.
Yes, Roth Dugan might be a stubborn old man, and often his attitude toward students wasn't exactly friendly; he might even assign extra homework to those poor students because of his bad mood.
But from a purely academic training perspective, Roth Dugan was actually a very good and excellent mentor.
For example, he wouldn't keep secrets during lectures, nor would he claim the honors that belonged to his students; he was even willing to take the blame for their minor mistakes harmlessly.
If Qiao Ze were to give him an evaluation, it would probably be as a very pure scholar.