2014, City of BaymackThe blazing hot sun in June was heating up the ground as if it were trying to evaporate every last bit of water from the asphalt roads.Blake Watson listened to the sound of cars honking and looked at the busy people rushing along the streets. He stood in front of the Com Business Hall as he stared straight at the roads. Although cooled air occasionally blew across his back, his thick costume prevented him from experiencing the luxury of air conditioning.Someone might ask, why was he here?Of course, it was for survival...Okay, let’s clarify.Telecom Business Hall partnered with Vivo phones to do a promotion over the summer holidays. Workers were paid 40 dollars an hour to stand outside the door in a puppet costume. The pay was almost double the pay of him handing out flyers and not to mention, he did not have to suffer from people rolling their eyes at him. Additionally, because the temperature outside was over 30 degrees, he would receive a 10 dollar per hour

Mission begin!”Blake closed his eyes and whispered the words. He did it two more times just in case it was not enough.When he opened his eyes, he saw a line of semi-transparent words floating in front of him.[Mission three begins. Current time: 0 hour. Timer stops when exiting the library.]Blake was startled by the words that appeared suddenly. He looked around the area and when he saw a student walked right through the semi-transparent words, he started to relax.It turned out that no one else could see the system’s words.Anyways, spend 24 hours reading a couple of books in the library and the mission should be completed, right?Blake walked towards the mathematics section as it was better than nothing. He was about to browse through the books when he suddenly noticed that the books had number labels. In addition, there was a pattern in the color of these number labels. As the numbers went from large to small, the colors went from red to gray.[Di Donne’s Foundation of Modern Ana

The library closed at 10 o’clock. Blake had just enough time to finish “Advanced Algebra” and “C Language Fifth Edition”.On the way out of the library, Blake glanced at the mission panel and saw that there were only nine hours left. He felt a little disappointed.He barely felt that fifteen hours had passed by. He had never felt time passed by like this while reading textbooks before.After a full day of studying, he discovered an issue. When he finished reading a book, that book’s value score would decrease to a single digit. Not just this, but other similar books’ value scores would also decrease to different amounts. On the other hand, books that were previously at a very low or even zero value scores started to increase to various amounts.For example, the “Di Donne Foundation of Modern Analysis” book only had a value score of 10 in the beginning, but now it had more than doubled to a value score of 30.As he walked home, Blake could not help but think of what would happen to his

At last, logic overcame greed. Blake dispelled his unrealistic idea.There was nothing special about a freshman publishing in a scientific journal. Not to mention, a lot of papers in the mathematical journals were subpar. As long as one’s English was good, one could probably sneak your way through even with subpar work.This type of masquerading behavior was exposed by an individual who ranked the journals by inferiority. The one ranked at number one was Applied Mathematics (AMC) as it was infamous for publishing subpar work.Some universities had published hundreds of AMC theses just in four years. It was not unusual for someone to publish 20 subpar theses in a year.To protect the academic integrity of the theses, some old-fashioned journals would often strictly limit the yearly published theses to 100 or less. However, this “monster journal” did not care. It published more than a thousand theses every year. This coupled with the phenomenon of overlapping resonance made the impact f

The consultation room did not even have a single empty seat.The third-year students preparing for graduate entrance exams were all focused on studying.Next to the lectern, sat the professor of University of Baymack’s mathematics department, Phil Thomas. He put the newspaper in his hand down and started to meticulously look at the question on the draft paper. His right hand flipped the pen cover repetitively.Blake stood next to him. He clearly understood that this little gesture meant that he was in his deep thinking mode.“Where did you get this question?” asked Phil Thomas suddenly after staring at the draft paper for a long time.“The textbook mentioned the Fourier series, so I went to the library to find related materials. I found variants of the Fourier inversion theorem and a few applications for the variants. I tried to derive them and was stuck on this one step,” said Blake with an apologetic smile. His facial expression was full of gratefulness.Phil looked at Blake for a s