I was a top student in America.

David didn't dare to say anything after hearing this.

Professor Jensen, however, had no intention of ending the conversation and immediately asked another question:

"How's the revision of your paper on the optimal constant of Hardy's inequality coming along?"

"Almost there." David straightened up instinctively and quickly replied.

"Send me the first draft as soon as you're done revising it."

Professor Jensen didn't even look up; his gaze returned to the draft proof on the table.

Now that his advisor had called him out, David dared not linger in the office any longer.

Although Professor Jensen asked casually, he still felt a little guilty and quickly picked up his prepared lecture notes and slipped back to his seat to diligently revise his draft.

He had previously thought he had plenty of time and planned to slowly refine the details of the proof.

But now, Li Ao, a high school student who has just entered the summer camp, is already organizing short papers on mathematical analysis, and has even gained Professor Jensen's approval.

It's really unacceptable for a doctoral student like him to keep delaying submitting his manuscript.

On the other side, Li Ao left the conference room and went straight to his dormitory, taking with him a USB drive and a stack of draft paper filled with derivations. He then went to the Granger Engineering Library.

He had already provided a complete proof of the two-sided approximation of the weighted Hermite-Hadamard inequality.

Now all you need to do is polish the draft on paper, add some content, and type it into the computer for typesetting; it shouldn't take much effort.

Fortunately, Professor Jensen granted him leave from the problem-solving class, leaving him with plenty of free time for the next few days.

A row of public desktop computers is placed in the window area on the second floor of the library.

Each monitor has a sticker indicating the campus network's NetID login option, and a printer and scanner are located nearby.

It's summer vacation now, so there aren't many students staying on campus, leaving plenty of empty computer seats.

Li Ao randomly picked an unused computer, sat down, and logged into the system using the temporary account he had been given during the summer camp.

The system desktop comes with the Office 2007 suite.

Li Ao opened Word, casually opened a new file, and began typing on the keyboard.

Weighted Hermite-Hadamard type two-sided estimation of inequalities and its discretization application

[Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of weighted convex function averaging, presenting a class of two-sided estimates based on piecewise integral averaging. By normalizing the discrete weights and transforming them into integral weights over intervals, we can obtain…]

As the title and abstract were finalized line by line, the blank document page was gradually filled with dense text and symbols.

To Li Ao's even greater surprise, just as he was concentrating on perfecting the proof, a system notification suddenly popped up in front of him:

[Under intense study conditions... Intelligence +0.1]

Now he has even more motivation to write.

Li Ao kept knocking until evening before finally getting up to grab a quick bite to eat at the cafeteria.

After returning, he continued to bury himself in front of the computer, completely blocking out the sounds of keyboards and occasional conversations around him.

Occasionally, passing students would glance at him, and judging from their demeanor, they mostly mistook him for an undergraduate student struggling with their graduation thesis during the summer.

"Writing my paper in the library's computer area is really inconvenient; I guess I'll have to find a way to buy a laptop."

Around 10 p.m., Li Ao glanced at the time in the lower right corner of the screen, finally stopped what he was doing, and rubbed his sore wrist.

After several hours of editing and revisions, the paper has already reached several pages.

At this pace, the first draft should be ready to be submitted to Professor Jensen before the end of this week's lectures.

He habitually pressed the save button and then copied the file to the USB drive.

Typing on a public computer is truly a pain—it can't be automatically saved, the screen locks frequently, and you have to be careful that someone else doesn't use it even when you go to the bathroom.

He unplugged the USB drive and couldn't help but mutter, "If I want to work on papers regularly in the future, I'll have to get my own computer."

Actually, he has some money in his account right now.

The bonuses, consulting fees, and subsidies from a while ago have all added up to a small amount of savings.

But this money needs to be saved for future college tuition, Grandma's medicine, and start-up capital for moving out of the South District.

He really couldn't bear to spend several hundred dollars on a new computer.

After much thought, I decided to wait until I had free time to try my luck at the school bulletin board, Craigslist, or the flea market in bookstores to find a cheap used machine.

Anyway, as long as he doesn't play games, can access the internet, and can run Office, that's enough for him.

Having made up his mind, Li Ao stopped hesitating, deleted his account, and walked back to his dormitory with his backpack.

……

After spending these past few days together, the students in dormitory 314 had already witnessed Li Ao's tenacity in studying for seventeen or eighteen hours a day.

So when he walked in through the night, no one found it surprising; they just assumed he had gone to the library to do practice problems again.

"I really envy you for being able to skip that homework class this afternoon. The three of us were practically brain-drained."

As soon as Taylor saw Li Ao enter, he immediately began to complain, "Two hours of combinatorics, two hours of plane geometry, and only ten minutes of free time in between. The coach filled the whiteboard with writing and then erased it, and then continued writing. Now, when I close my eyes, all I see in my head are countless auxiliary lines flying around."

"That's right, I've almost worn out half of my notebook copying."

Ethan slumped at the table and weakly replied.

Li Ao glanced at the two of them.

Indeed, the two of them looked noticeably more listless than at noon, and their eyes even had some dark circles.

"Drink more water and drink less energy drinks," he casually offered a simple suggestion.

No sooner had he finished speaking than Kevin pushed the door open and came in, his hair still wet.

He had just finished showering in the bathroom on the floor, and when he looked up and saw Li Ao, he immediately came over: "Leo, you were transferred to Professor Philip's analysis seminar this afternoon because you got a perfect score on the placement test, right?"

"Okay." Li Ao hung up his bag and nodded.

"In the entire black belt group, you're probably the only one who got a perfect score." Taylor's tone was full of admiration.

Li Ao thought for a moment: "Benjamin too."

"He's different; after all, he's the gold medalist at last year's IMO," Kevin said, drying his hair with a towel.

The dormitory was quiet for a brief moment.

The conversation should have ended there, but Ethan suddenly leaned back in his chair and sighed, "But Leo studies for more than ten hours a day, working so hard, it's only natural that he got a perfect score."

This reminded Kevin. He stopped drying his hair and casually asked, "By the way, I also went to study on the second floor of the Granger Library tonight, why didn't I see you?"

I didn't go to the study area today.

Li Ao truthfully stated, "Professor Jensen asked me to write a short note, and I spent the whole night typing in the public computer area."

"Write a thesis?!" the three exclaimed in unison, their voices rising eight octaves.

For these high school students, the word "thesis" is simply too far removed from their lives.

Even the top students in national competitions still have to wait until they go to university and join a professor's research group before they can even get a feel for scientific research.

But now, my peers who sleep under the same roof have already started writing papers independently, and these are even tasks assigned by their supervisors!

They initially thought that everyone's scores were just a little low in the initial assessment, and that they could catch up by doing a lot of practice problems later.

It seems that this gap can no longer be bridged simply by doing more practice problems.

Seeing their stunned expressions, Li Ao didn't want to provoke them further, but after thinking about it, he casually mentioned it:

"Um... the professor also said that I can choose which regular problem-solving classes to attend. He has a small project later that he might need me to help organize some materials."

The air froze instantly.

The three people looked at each other, and none of them responded.

"Okay, okay, stop asking!" Taylor wailed, throwing herself onto the bed and pulling the covers over her head. "If you ask again, nobody's sleeping tonight!"

For the next few days, Li Ao lived a life of going back and forth between two points.

Aside from attending a few required lectures and discussion classes, he spent almost all his remaining time in front of the library's public computers.

Finally, at the end of the first week of summer camp lectures, he typed the last punctuation mark and completely finished the first draft of the short essay.

……