Eliminating the Navier-Stokes Equation

After Professor Fefferman left, Lu Zhou took out his phone to call Wei Wen.

The phone quickly connected.

"Hello?"

Lu Zhou asked, "Are you free right now?"

Wei Wen said, "I am, why?"

Lu Zhou said, "Come to my house. If Jerick is there, bring him along. I have a manuscript that I have to transfer to the computer, and I need your help!"

…

Lu Zhou wasn't the first to use a topology method to research partial differential equations. This method was first seen in Hilbert's thesis, and later on, it was also seen in Banach and Braun's theses.

One of the more recent applications of this method was probably by the French mathematician Leray Schauder; this was one of the reasons he won the 1979 Wolf Prize.

However, even with these theses and research results, using topological methods to study partial differential equations had never become an independent discipline.