Chapter Two: Who Stole the Proof

Only the last row remained empty in the symposium hall. Shen entered on a forty-dollar ticket bought with his medal. He Chongshan stood beneath a slide titled “A Unified Spectral-Gap Method,” presenting Shen's definitions as his own. In the audience sat journal editors, celebrated mathematicians, and Xu Zhi—Shen's former collaborator, who three months earlier had abruptly warned him, “Stop investigating the raw data.” At the key lemma, He replaced a conditional expectation with an ordinary expectation. “There is no coupling that permits that,” Shen said, standing. He sighed theatrically. “This student's funding ended because of his excessive attachment to immature ideas. He has also used an unauthorized model to generate text.”