Chapter 1092 Winter Has Arrived in Silicon Valley
When Elon finally made up his mind to contract Star Sky Technology, he realized he was a step behind.
To his surprise, the first to react was Zuckerberg, the one he thought would be the most against Star Sky Technology bringing their virtual reality product to America.
By the time his secretary reported this incident, this lizard robot CEO had already liquidated their subsidiary company Oculus, laying off more than 2,000 employees. Only the core employees were maintained. It seemed like they had decided to cut their losses early.
Prior to this, when Facebook acquired Oculus for two billion USD in 2014, the public was optimistic about Facebook’s future.
However, things didn’t always turn out as expected.
In fact, Zuckerberg did not have a choice.
Maybe if they gave Oculus enough time to improve their head-mounted virtual reality technology, they could one day achieve truly immersive virtual reality.
However, when he saw that Star Sky Technology had already created the technology, he knew that they had no time at all.
Instead of letting Oculus go through an unwinnable battle in the virtual reality field, it was better to cut them loose and defend their core business.
He knew exactly what the core business of Facebook was, Oculus was just the icing on the cake.
Facebook could easily afford a mere two billion dollar loss. After all, Facebook had paid way more than two billion dollars in European fines alone.
However, for other Silicon Valley virtual reality startups, this was a nightmare. It was like a deadly winter arriving in the middle of summer; they had no preparation, no hope of surviving.
While the virtual reality startups in Silicon Valley were dying, many smart people like Zuckerberg had already begun negotiating with Star Sky Technology.
If they couldn’t prevent the change, they might as well jump on the bandwagon.
Most people knew that the Phantom system from Star Sky Technology had no compet.i.tion, nor could anyone bypa.s.s their patent barriers. Cooperating with Star Sky Technology was the best option.
This was similar to when the Windows operating system was released to the personal computer market.
The only difference was that, not only did Star Sky Technology master the world’s first neural interface virtual reality system, but they also had control over the patents…
The tech industry wasn’t the only one that was affected, the financial markets were also hit.
Companies in the finance industry were evaluating the possible impacts of this new technology.
Star Sky Technology, like most companies with good cash flow, did not choose to go public. Hence, they could not use the stock price as a value indicator.
However, according to most estimates by Wall Street financial companies, the value of the virtual reality technology alone was already 100 billion USD, with the potential to grow even higher.
Not to mention this was a conservative estimate, without an understanding of the specific model.
If, like most people had speculated, Star Sky Technology pivoted to cloud computing and integrated the virtual reality network into one of many supercomputing centers…
Then it would be worth way more than 100 billion.
Its worth wouldn’t even be measurable.
Even though the Star Sky Technology product launch was generally regarded as satisfying to a certain extent, one conference was obviously not enough for this ground-breaking technology.
Many questions had yet to be answered, and reporters around the world wanted to interview Lu Zhou himself.
However, even though the reporters sneaked past security and went to the number theory lecture at Jin University, they still weren’t able to find Academician Lu.
It was almost like Lu Zhou had disappeared from the planet.
Only people close to him knew that he was going on a great retreat.
While the world was going crazy over the virtual reality technology, a paper published in Inventiones Mathematicae caused a commotion in the mathematics world.
The paper used a unique mathematical method to construct a coh.o.m.ology ring motive, combining all coh.o.m.ology theories into an abstract geometrical object.
Everyone obviously knew that motive theory studied the abstract behind numbers.
Lu Zhou was not satisfied with solving the two-century-old crown of mathematics: the Riemann’s hypothesis. Instead, he dove deeper into the field of algebraic geometry, specifically, the geometric structure of numbers.
This was no longer a quest for a mathematician; it had almost gotten to a philosophical, epistemological level.
If he could succeed, he would undoubtedly become the greatest scholar since Archimedes.
It would take a long time for someone to match his achievements.
In addition to this interesting paper, what surprised people was that the reviewer of this paper was Perelman, the math genius who left the mathematics community for years.
This eccentric genius once refused a one million dollar prize, stating his disappointment in the mathematics world. Now, he agreed to review a paper from Inventiones Mathematicae?
Most scholars couldn’t believe this.
Everyone knew he loathed the “arrogant” review process of academic journals. Almost all of his papers were published to arXiv.
He was one of the legendary mathematicians on arXiv.
Of course, even though the public was surprised, none of them were as surprised as Lu Zhou.
Three days before Lu Zhou submitted his paper, Lu Zhou went to his office and planned on teaching an undergraduate cla.s.s. He saw someone standing in front of his office.
Lu Zhou was holding a textbook in his hand when he looked at Perelman. He was stunned.
Perelman: “What?”
“… Nothing, I just didn’t expect to see you here.” Lu Zhou coughed and said, “I think any mathematician in this world would be surprised to see you standing in front of their office… Why didn’t you send me an email? I could’ve had someone picked you up at the airport.”
“This is a university, right?” Perelman looked at Lu Zhou with a strange look. “Isn’t this the place to discuss academic issues? Do I need to send an email first?”
“Of course not, but usually, people give a heads up before visiting someone… Of course, I don’t mind.” Lu Zhou smiled and said, “So, are you going to tell me why you’re here?”
Perelman spoke concisely.
“Because of mathematics.
“When I was researching your paper, I found an interesting point. When you abstracted coh.o.m.ology theory as a geometric object, you mentioned that the motive could be treated as high-dimensional Jacobian curves, I want to know why you did this.”
Lu Zhou shook his head and said, “Actually, this is not my idea. I read it somewhere when I was reading Grothendieck’s paper on the Weil’s conjecture, and it inspired me—”
“Can you teach me?”
Lu Zhou looked at Perelman’s enthusiastic face and smiled.
“Of course I can… But I have a number theory cla.s.s soon. I’m afraid I won’t be able to discuss this with you until four o’clock.”
Perelman looked at Lu Zhou with a sincere look and said, “No problem, I can wait!”