I'm a scientist, why can't I have faith?

At 7:30 a.m., Wang Dong and Gong Zhan stood facing each other at the entrance of Room 408, Lijiao Building.

Half an hour before class started, the 400-seat lecture hall was almost full.

Only the last two rows have a few scattered seats left.

Today is the first class, and Wang Dong thought that everyone at Yanda University would be highly motivated to learn, but he didn't expect it to be this intense.

Still slightly sleepy after getting out of bed, the two could only sheepishly sit at the very back of the math department students.

The school bell rang, and an elderly man with gray hair and a neatly dressed collar walked in.

He didn't bring any lesson plans or textbooks; he was just holding a thermos.

But no one would underestimate this seemingly frail old man, simply because his name was Lu Jiuzhang, the same Jiuzhang as in "Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art".

He is not only the chief editor of the Yenching University Press edition of "Mathematical Analysis" in Wang Dong's hands, but also a legendary professor in the Department of Mathematics at Yenching University, a direct disciple of Professor Hua, and has published countless articles in top journals.

What's most awe-inspiring is actually the old man's course failure rate, which is a whopping 50%!

According to previous students, half of the students couldn't understand Professor Lu's lectures, while the other half who did understand eventually became top talents, which shows the value of the name Lu Jiuzhang.

Everyone present stared intently at the old man, and you could even see a kind of fanatical devotion in the eyes of some of the students.

Among the students present, there were many top students who were admitted through competitions, and the name Lu Jiuzhang was very familiar to them.

The reference books they used for the competition were compiled by the old man in his spare time, but they caused them a lot of trouble at the time.

For them, choosing Yenching University over Tsinghua University was largely due to their admiration for the old man.

Lu Jiuzhang smiled and looked around at the students present, then turned around and slowly began to write on the blackboard.

Older professors still prefer traditional teaching methods, and of course, PowerPoint is indeed too difficult to use for mathematics.

It takes a long time to find all sorts of strange symbols, and in the classroom, there is still a lot of content that the teacher needs to write on the blackboard by hand.

"Before we begin class, I hope all of you will keep one thing in mind."

"Don't believe what I say, and don't believe what's written in the books."

"You will only believe what you yourselves have proven."

Grandpa Lu's opening was unique, directly destroying the common sense and experience that these chosen ones had learned in the first twelve years.

If you don't trust the book and only trust the teacher in class, how can you learn?

Seeing the puzzled looks on his classmates' faces, Grandpa Lu smiled smugly.

"This is the spirit that the Department of Mathematics at Yenching University has carried on for decades, and we hope that you can pass it on."

The students were speechless. Mr. Lu... why is he speaking in such a breathless manner?

Wang Dong simply found the old man quite interesting.

Then the formal lecture began.

"To learn mathematics, you must first know what real numbers are..."

"There are many rigorous definitions of real numbers, the most common being the Dedekind division and Cauchy sequence..."

Professor Lu's blackboard writing was extremely fluent; he wrote as he explained, without pausing at all.

Wang Dong finally understood why the old man hadn't brought his textbooks and lesson plans. Judging by his fluency, it seemed like the old man could recite the entire textbook from memory on the spot.

As expected of a mathematics master, although the first lesson didn't cover many key concepts, it gave Wang Dong a new understanding of mathematics.

If high school mathematics teaches people how to calculate, and competition mathematics teaches people how to solve problems, then true mathematics teaches people how to think, how to build the entire edifice of mathematics from a set of axioms that start from nothing.

Even something as simple as "1+1=2" requires rigorous proof.

There were no assumptions; everything was based on rigorous deduction and meticulous proof.

This is what mathematics is all about.

Wang Dong suddenly understood what had seemed strange about his previous attempts to study the book.

No wonder I didn't understand when I was studying the book before; it turns out I hadn't grasped the true essence of mathematics...

Professor Lu's explanation was so captivating that Wang Dong felt like the get out of class was over before it even started, and the two hours felt like an eternity.

Although he wanted to continue, he had to head straight to the classroom for the next class.

The next course on Artificial Intelligence at the School of Information Science and Technology will be even more popular than Professor Lu's Mathematical Analysis.

Even though Wang Dong and Gong Zhan rushed to the classroom as soon as get out of class ended, they still couldn't get seats.

If Tang Xiu hadn't arrived early to save seats for his roommates, they probably would have had to stand in the last row to listen to the lecture.

Top students are always keeping up with the trends.

Besides students from the School of Information Science and Technology and Yuanpei College, many students from other departments also took this course.

The first lecture was given by Professor Du Fan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

"Is it really Academician Du Fan who will personally give the lecture?"

"It's already posted on the academic affairs system, how could it be fake?"

"Holy crap, this is one of the hottest people since the advent of AI..."

"I heard he's going to be elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences this year. He'll then be a big shot with two academician titles, and he'll be even busier. Cherish this lecture..."

Not only students who had enrolled in the course, but even some who hadn't enrolled came to listen when they heard that Academician Du Fan was teaching.

When classes officially started, even standing tickets for the back rows were hard to come by.

Academician Du Fan is very young, only in his early fifties, but he already has quite a few gray hairs. The main topic of his lecture today is intelligence.

"In the first lesson, we won't talk about ChatGPT, Transformer, or anything you've seen in the news."

Academician Du Fan's voice was not loud, but it could be clearly heard in every corner of the classroom.

"Let me start with a question: what exactly is the 'intelligence' in artificial intelligence?"

As expected of Peking University, several answers have already appeared as soon as Du Fan raised his question.

"Is it the ability to solve complex problems?"

"No, it should be the ability to learn and reason."

"I think it's self-awareness."

Du Fan smiled and nodded; he really enjoyed the atmosphere of the discussion.

"What the students said makes some sense, but these are manifestations of intelligence rather than its essence."

Du Fan turned around and wrote two large characters on the blackboard: Prediction.

"The essence of intelligence is the ability to predict the future."

A paramecium can predict where there is food and where there is danger; this is the most primitive form of intelligence.

A primitive human being could predict where a stone would land when thrown, and could predict the harvest after sowing in spring and reaping in autumn. This is the origin of human intelligence.

All artificial intelligence currently in use is essentially doing the same thing—predicting the next token based on past data.

Dufan calls this process statistical fitting, which is what all the big models are doing now.

However, there is an even broader field beyond this: causal reasoning. This is true intelligence, and it is the field he is currently advancing.

Du Fan truly lived up to his reputation as a leading figure who was about to become two academicians; every viewpoint and argument he presented deeply impressed the students present.

At the end of the course, he left his email address.

"Students are welcome to email me after class to discuss this further."

Although it was an academician's email address, most students didn't take it seriously.

After all, they are extremely busy people. Who would care about an email from a freshman? It's just a polite remark.

None of the three, including Gong Zhan, made a point of recording it; only Wang Dong quietly took a photo.