"Medical... medical fees?"
Lin Ke widened his eyes, looking at the white-clad angel in uniform in front of him.
"Yes, Mr. Lin." A trace of impatience flashed across the nurse’s face: "You had a stroke while fishing, it was like a heavy blow, and it was a fellow angler who found you and brought you here."
Lin Ke immediately recalled.
Was it... eighteen years ago?
He was by the water with his favorite Great Wilderness brand fishing rod, and then inexplicably crossed over and turned from Mr. Lin to Mr. Azanen.
It feels like something very, very important...
Lin Ke suddenly clutched his head, feeling waves of intense pain, and then as voices shouted "How are you?" "Doctor, call the doctor quickly," he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Recovering for three months.
Lin Ke eventually pulled through from his stroke.
He only felt like he had forgotten something important, but life always has to move forward.
His parents had passed away at some unknown time, leaving him with no relatives, only a few roommates.
After graduating with a PhD, the company gave him a long leave to recuperate when he fell ill.
Yet he resolutely quit his job and joined the country’s top thermophysics research laboratory instead.
Both contributing to the nation’s scientific deficiencies and striving to explore the boundless truth.
For some reason, he was very proficient in thermodynamics, as if he could personally control the transformation of entropy in a dream.
Thus, he went from a PhD to an associate professor, then to a professor, and even became an academician.
But, life gradually inundated him.
In his youth, paying off house loans, car loans, food, clothing, shelter, transportation, basic needs...
With rare gaming as entertainment, reading novels to ease some emptiness.
After entering middle age, he gained both fame and fortune, possessing the broadest connections, the most powerful research institute, the wealthiest assets.
He seemed to have gained everything.
Yet, he always felt a sense of unreality.
Lin Ke felt that the life he desired was not .
Not mindlessly exploring truth, not chasing fame and fortune through worldly endeavors.
Most certainly not a life filled with indulgence and intoxication.
No, the life he was familiar with wasn’t !
He even tried being an actor, a singer, a writer, a factory owner, a county mayor...
But everything felt slightly off!
So, the renowned mathematician, physicist, chemist, biologist, and social and economic scientist — Lin Ke, launched a fierce assault on the world’s known unsolved problems.
Economic and capital operations, genetic exploration projects, beyond the periodic table of elements...
Thermophysics, nuclear physics, optics, electrodynamics...
Finally, the ultimate mathematical challenges!
The scholar Lin Ke, who astounded the world, easily swept through all the problems, leaving a pile of mathematical challenges!
NP-complete problems, the Hodge conjecture, Poincaré conjecture, Riemann hypothesis, Yang-Mills existence and mass gap, Navier-Stokes equation, BSD conjecture.
The seven great mathematical problems of the world, which are also the most brilliant eight pearls on the crown of modern mathematics!
In Lin Ke’s perception, these eight problems were immensely difficult; calling them pearls would be inaccurate, they were mountains, suffocating any mathematician who laid eyes on them.
So, Lin Ke specially chose a day to relax, visiting many places, amusement parks, internet cafes, sports centers, fishing ponds, zoos...
Yet his mind couldn’t truly relax.
When riding horses at the racetrack, he felt the most at ease in his heart.
He could sense that he should live on horseback, not being ferried by others in a Red Flag car or a stretched Lincoln.
He even spent a fortune on the most robust steed, but riding it still lacked something.
Finally ready, he began to solve those mathematical problems.
In the deserted library, Lin Ke picked up a thick stack of paper and approached a desk.
The seven great problems.
The gray-haired, aged Lin Ke didn’t know which one to use as a starting point.
All the problems solvable in non-deterministic polynomial time form the NP class...
The conjecture concerning the algebraic topology of non-singular complex algebraic varieties and their relation to geometry expressed by the polynomial equations of their defining subvarieties...
Every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere...
One by one, problems fell under Lin Ke’s pen, recorded on the pristine A4 paper.
Mathematics is the foundation of science.
The reason Lin Ke could solve so many problems was largely due to his extremely robust foundation in mathematics.
And now, he wanted to select one with inspiration to solve.
But he didn’t notice that as he wrote those challenges down one by one, the world was trembling.
The world became more real!
"Yes, it seems that the meaning of my life is not those forty to fifty Nobel Prizes, but solving these problems..."
Lin Ke increasingly felt that solving these problems was his lifelong pursuit.
However, when he wrote down the famous Riemann Hypothesis, the pen tip suddenly stopped.
"Riemann Hypothesis... Riemann Hypothesis..."
Lin Ke suddenly felt a faint sense of familiarity arise from deep within.
At one moment, he had used the Riemann Hypothesis to defeat a terrifying adversary?