CHAPTER 277: CHAPTER 117: THE SILENT CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MENTORS

After the first stage of the Olympic Competition training ended, Qiao Yu, although planning to rest, still obediently wrote a summary of his thoughts on reading papers and sent it to Director Tian and Elder Yuan at Huaqing. This time, it wasn’t really to show how hard-working he was, but with a purpose.

This was because during the entire training period, he was constantly researching the paper on the Geometric Langlands Conjecture.

Director Tian might not look at his summary himself, but Qiao Yu believed that Elder Yuan would certainly pass it on to Professor Pan.

This way, if he misunderstood something, Professor Pan could point it out to him.

The reason he didn’t send it directly to Professor Pan himself was mainly because Qiao Yu felt embarrassed.

Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself.

If someone thought of a question every day and directly sent it to him... and each day they could summarize several questions, continuing for nearly half a month, Qiao Yu felt he would have blocked this person long ago.

Although Professor Pan hadn’t blocked him, he had already started to feel that this Huaqing professor was responding slower and slower.

In the first couple of days after adding him, he was the fastest to reply, almost replying immediately when there was a question, but gradually, his responses became slower.

During the training, there was even an instance where a question he sent one day wasn’t replied to by Professor Pan until a day and a half later...

Qiao Yu never considered if it was because his questions were becoming more challenging, requiring Professor Pan to discuss them with others before replying. Moreover, Professor Pan hadn’t told him that he wasn’t at Huaqing at all, but had gone abroad for a conference.

Qiao Yu was simply sensitive enough to feel that perhaps Professor Pan had changed and started to become slightly annoyed with him. It was not a question he could directly ask, so he could only maneuver around it.

There’s not much to say about the following week; the books continued to be read, and the papers continued to be studied.

Instead of the intended papers about Prime Numbers, Qiao Yu switched to that over 800-page paper on the Geometric Langlands Conjecture.

Studying while reading undoubtedly slowed down the pace of going through the paper.

The books he read this week didn’t appear systematic to a normal professor.

But this was precisely Qiao Yu’s forte—finding books to read as needed.

There were quite a few books to read regarding the Geometric Langlands Program. Previously, Qiao Yu felt tired because there was no direction, but now with a goal to strive for, this kind of task didn’t seem as exhausting anymore.

Moreover, the training schedule wasn’t too tight, and the collective living ensured Qiao Yu could sleep at eleven every night and wake up at six-thirty every morning, making up for the lost sleep from before.

Oh right, there was something else worth mentioning.

Yu Yongjun added Gong Jiatao to the friends’ group.

No wonder, these days, the two of them got along really well. However, as the group admin, when Qiao Yu saw these two in the same group, he decided to speak even less in the group from now on.

After all, obvious mischief can be dodged, but hidden nastiness is hard to defend against.

Yu Yongjun belonged to the standard obvious mischief type, with a very agile mind, but he only talked about all kinds of shameless moves without actually implementing them.

Gong Jiatao, on the other hand, was clearly the hidden mischief type, looking decent on the surface, but playing all sorts of tricks quite liberally, whether they worked or not, he would try them first.

As for Yu Wei...

Initially, Qiao Yu thought he was the only genuinely kind person in the group, just a bit introverted. But now it seemed, the guy could lie without blushing, appearing quite scheming.

This briefly made Qiao Yu suspect that the reason these people were getting into competitions instead of taking the normal college entrance exams was that if they took the exams, people would discover that, given their political thinking levels, they should be immediately arrested and executed...

Of course, the feeling was mutual.

What Qiao Yu didn’t know was that Yu Yongjun and Gong Jiatao often had similar thoughts in private... For instance, they thought that someone like Qiao Yu should not be participating in math competitions with them, but rather should be sent to a high-end biology lab for live tissue research.

The friendships formed during competition phases were thus so pure and beautiful.

Of course, this didn’t mean that both sides would truly become enemies.

Actually, everyone was always learning from each other. Just as Qiao Yu thought he should learn from Yu Yongjun and Gong Jiatao’s thick-skinned nature, Gong Jiatao and Yu Yongjun agreed that once they returned to school, they must find some classmates to play games while solving problems together.

They even secretly tested it out in private; if they exchanged the Olympic Competition questions with regular high school practice questions, they could still handle them skillfully.

Of course, the competition rules needed slight adjustments, and they couldn’t face off against those who were strong in gaming.

But these didn’t seem to be big issues, as in their high school, for regular students, keeping up with the majority of classmates already required exerting maximum effort, leaving little spare energy for games.

After all, in this day and age, during the schooling phase, the only ones truly qualified to squander some time on games are the elementary school students...

But the two had valid reasons, only by regaining the self-respect trampled by others could they recover their confidence and achieve good results in international competitions.

In this respect, in the group of four friends, Yu Wei was probably the only one who could truly embody kindness.

But Qiao Yu didn’t care.

The only thing that made him sigh was that recently even messages from Director Tian and the grandmaster across were returning slower and slower.

Well, the start of the semester, all the big shots are busy, Qiao Yu comforted himself this way.

But there were still gains; for instance, one day, Professor Pan, who had been increasingly slow to respond, suddenly sent him an address, directly providing him with a username and password. Upon logging in, Qiao Yu discovered that the latest videos all featured various conferences on the recent discussions of the Geometric Langlands Conjecture.