dognovel Chapter 6 What did you do wrong?
Chapter 6 What did you do wrong?
Lu Feng ate dinner very quickly, finishing a bowl of wontons and two steamed buns in ten minutes.
When I pushed open the dormitory door, a wave of heat mixed with shouts came rushing towards me.
"Open! I'll open!"
"What the hell are you doing? It's my turn!"
"I'll check the cards! I'll check the cards this time!"
"You need to polish my shoes."
In the open space in the middle of the dormitory, a suitcase was laid flat on the ground to serve as a card table.
Five people sat in a circle, some squatting, some sitting cross-legged on the ground, with a pile of crumpled playing cards and Want Want milk candies scattered in the middle as chips.
Zhang Wei sat with his back to the door, holding three cards in his hand, his expression as conflicted as if he were constipated.
Zhang Wei glanced at the doorway out of the corner of his eye and immediately turned around: "Old Lu! Come quick, we're just short one person!"
Lu Feng tossed his backpack onto his bed, glanced at the card game, and said, "You guys play first, I'm going to look up some research online."
"Brother!" Zhang Wei said with a pained expression, "You've been holed up in the library all day, rushing back for dinner every night. You need to learn to relax, you know? Work-life balance is key! Look at you, if you keep studying like this you'll ruin yourself."
Lu Feng pulled out a chair, sat down, opened his laptop, and waited for it to slowly spin up and boot up.
"You talk as if you're a great fighter."
"How come I can't play anymore?" Zhang Wei retorted, unconvinced.
Lu Feng didn't even turn his head: "Who was it that got a triple last time, got so excited they almost flipped the table, only to get beaten by someone else with a 235?"
A burst of laughter erupted in the dormitory.
"Holy crap, Lao Lu, you still remember this?!" Zhang Wei blushed, his voice cracking. "That was an accident! Who knew 235 could eat a leopard?!"
"It's written in the rules," someone added.
"Shut up, you lot!"
Lu Feng smiled.
He remembered this scene very clearly. Even after graduating so many years ago in his previous life, some people still brought it up to laugh at Zhang Wei at class reunions.
Lu Feng still remembers the smug look on Zhang Wei's face when he got three Qs.
Then the person opposite slowly flipped over a 2, 3, 5, and Zhang Wei was completely petrified.
Despite the laughter, his hands didn't stop.
The computer finally booted up, and Lu Feng opened his browser and searched for a few academic papers.
In 2012, there weren't many papers published in this field in China; a search result showed fewer than thirty.
Most of them are review articles, with only seven or eight articles containing original derivations.
After reading it, I switched to the foreign language database and typed in "fractional calculus constitutive equation".
There are more English papers, but only about ten are of high quality.
The most in-depth work so far is done by an Italian research group that has built a generalized Maxwell model using the Riemann-Liouville derivative, which was published in the International Journal of Solids and Structures.
Lu Feng spent forty minutes going through the core derivation of this article.
The Italians were meticulous in their mathematical processing, but compared to the solutions in the blueprints, they took a detour.
Lu Feng stared at the paper on the screen, his fingers tapping unconsciously on the table.
The value of this blueprint was even more terrifying than he had anticipated.
Over at the dormitory, Zhang Wei had gone all in again at some point, and a series of wailing and howling could be heard.
Lu Feng ignored him and continued flipping to the next paper.
.........
Office of Counselors, School of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong.
Li Shuzheng gathered the documents on the table into a stack, preparing to shut down the computer and leave.
There wasn't much work to do today. I finished approving a few leave requests and sorted out half of the new student files. I'll deal with the rest tomorrow.
The landline rang.
Li Shu glanced at the caller ID; it was an internal number, which he didn't recognize.
He hesitated for a moment but still accepted.
"Hello, this is Li Shu, counselor of the School of Mechanical Engineering."
"Hello Professor Li, I am Ye Guodong from the Department of Mathematics."
Li Shu was stunned for a moment.
Ye Guodong, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics.
He doesn't usually interact much with people in the math department, so why is he suddenly calling?
"Teacher Ye, what can I do for you?"
Ye Guodong spoke a little faster than usual on the other end of the phone: "It's like this, I wanted to ask if you could give me the contact information for a student named Lu Feng in your Mechanical Engineering Class 1?"
Li Shu's heart skipped a beat.
A mathematics associate professor came specifically to inquire about his students?
"Teacher Ye, may I ask... what did Lu Feng do wrong?" Li Shu asked in a low voice.
Ye Guodong chuckled on the other end of the phone: "No, no, I didn't do anything wrong. I just have some study questions I'd like to ask him. I saw some study notes he left at the library today, and I wanted to talk to him about them."
Problems with your studies?
A math professor approached him, a first-year mechanical engineering student... to talk about his studies?
Li Shu didn't say anything, but the question marks in his heart could stretch to the end of the corridor.
But Ye Guodong's tone didn't sound like he was complaining, so he gave Lu Feng's QQ number.
"Okay, thank you, Teacher Li. Sorry to bother you."
"You're too kind."
After hanging up the phone, Li Shu sat in his chair and pondered for a long time.
He recognized the name Lu Feng.
He skipped class three times in less than a month since the start of the semester, far ahead of the rest of the grade on the absenteeism list.
It's not usually a good thing for a student to be approached by a professor.
But Ye Guodong explicitly stated that it was a "problem with his studies".
Li Shu couldn't figure it out, so he opened QQ, found Lu Feng's profile picture, and sent him a message.
.........
The card game in the dormitory continued, while Lu Feng was pondering a paper on the screen about the asymptotic expansion of the Mittag-Leffler function, and the more he read, the clearer the ideas became.
QQ's notification sound popped up.
A small friend request window pops up in the bottom right corner of the screen.
Note: Professor Ye from the Department of Mathematics.
Lu Feng's hand hovered above the touchpad.
Mathematics Department? Professor Ye?
He mentally went through all the teachers he knew.
The teacher for Advanced Mathematics was not surnamed Ye; the teacher for Mechanical Principles was Li Hongde; and the counselor was Li Shu.
The math department? He didn't even know where the math department building was.
It had only been four weeks since the start of the semester, and there was no way he could have any interaction with the math department professors.
Telecommunications fraud?
However, in 2012, scammers were probably still at the stage of making phone calls and sending text messages, and wouldn't be using QQ for phishing.
He didn't rush to agree; just as he was hesitating, QQ rang again.
This time, it was Li Shu's message box that was flashing.
Li Shu: Lu Feng, what have you been up to lately?
Lu Feng: Huh?
Li Shu: A math professor named Ye just called me and asked for your contact information. You haven't gotten into any trouble, have you?
Lu Feng stared at the message for three seconds.
Li Shu is usually easy to talk to, so the fact that he specifically sent a message to ask about this matter shows that it is indeed not a routine thing.
Lu Feng: I didn't do anything.
"That's strange." Li Shu sent a scratching head emoji.
"Do you know Ye Guodong? He's an associate professor in the mathematics department, specializing in mathematical analysis. He's quite well-known at our university. When he came to see me just now, he looked very serious; it didn't seem like he was just asking casually."
Ye Guodong.
Lu Feng had heard of this name in his previous life, but they had no connection.
The Department of Mathematics at the University of Hong Kong has several outstanding professors, including Yip Kwok-tung, who apparently later became a professor.
It's strange that an associate professor from the mathematics department would suddenly come to a freshman from the mechanical engineering department asking for his contact information.
"Did the counselor say what he wanted to see me about?"
"He didn't go into details, just said he wanted to talk to you about some academic issues. Why don't you add him first? Professor Ye is a nice guy, not the difficult type."
Lu Feng thought for a moment, then switched back to the friend request message and clicked "accept".
Messages are replied to almost instantly.
"Hello, are you Lu Feng?"
"Hello, Teacher Ye, it's me."
"Did you spend the entire afternoon in the second-to-last row by the window on the second floor of the library?"
Lu Feng's fingers paused on the keyboard for a moment.
"yes."
The other person was typing very fast, and several messages popped up one after another.
"When you left, did you leave a piece of scrap paper on the table with the derivation of the recurrence relation of the Gamma function and the Laplace transform of the Caputo fractional derivative?"
Lu Feng then realized what was happening.
I guess they forgot a piece of draft paper at the library.
When he left, he was so focused on putting away the books and most of the drafts that he didn't notice one of the sheets that had slipped out of the textbook.