Li Yu and others got off the carriage, planning to stop and watch for a few minutes before continuing on their way. Anyway, the city is not big now and it will not delay things.
Someone happened to be shouting loudly nearby: "A miracle, a miracle! Look at the statue at the door of my house, it is dripping with holy water from Heavenly Father!"
A group of people gathered around a middle-aged man with greasy hair and a big beard. Many of the people in the crowd were women.
The middle-aged man stood in front of a statue of the Crucifixion of Jesus and talked to the crowd in front of him: "I have long said that I can predict the future. The ground under my feet has received the gospel, and I am the incarnation of the gospel. ! You see, this is the divine water from the Lord, which can wash away your sinful souls."
The feet of the statue of Jesus in front of him are dripping with water from time to time, which seems quite magical.
All the onlookers regarded it as a miracle and stepped forward to get the water and drank it religiously.
The middle-aged man said proudly: "Pray! Remember, this is the water of God brought to you by Rasputin!"
Rasputin!
I'm dizzy. Li Yu didn't expect to meet this super guy as soon as he arrived in St. Petersburg.
Now he has not entered the palace and committed adultery in the harem, but he has begun to fool around in St. Petersburg, and of course he wants to attract the attention of the nobles.
This guy was born in a peasant family and had little education. He had been in an Orthodox monastery before, but he often had sex with female believers. The priest expelled him for the sake of the sanctity of the monastery.
At this time, many Russian aristocrats were obsessed with theology. Rasputin was crazy about creating a priest persona, and many people actually believed in him.
Three years later, he entered the palace of Tsar Nicholas II, cured the crown prince's illness by mistake, and gained the queen's trust.
This guy is so brave, he actually dared to cuckold the Tsar again!
Although the Tsar was aware of it, he once again gained the trust of Nicholas II through magic tricks!
Even when Nicholas II went to war in person during World War I, this kid actually controlled the government at home, and important ministers were replaced at his request.
The key is that Nicholas II trusted him very much and even asked Rasputin for his opinion before going to war. I don’t know how much this guy contributed to the disastrous defeat of Tsarist Russia in World War I.
Rasputin was very lecherous in private, had inappropriate relationships with many aristocratic women, and liked to collect the hair of virgin women. Later, it was also rumored that after his death, a museum collected his "treasure", which was said to be very large.
It’s like the Russian version of Lao Poison.
Li Yu said to Markov: "This person looks very popular now?"
Markov said disdainfully: "He's just a hooligan. It's a pity that we can't stop the believers from being fanatical about him."
Zhang Deyi looked at it from a distance and saw that the surface of the feet of the crucifix was indeed dripping with water, so he said: "It looks like Jesus is really appearing."
Li Yu hated the magic stick the most. He didn't care about the Kazan Cathedral. He looked around the statue from a distance and said to Markov: "You can ask the municipal department to come and take a look. It's probably because the sewer is leaking."
Markov didn't see anything strange for a moment and asked: "Sewer?"
Li Yu nodded: "There is a crack on the statue. I see that there is a sewer pipe underneath. It is probably leaking. Then the capillary siphon phenomenon caused the water to flow to the statue, and then drip down again."
Next to him, Lyapunov couldn't help laughing: "So, what they drink is the sewage discharged from the toilet?"
Li Yu put his finger on his mouth: "Shhh! Keep your voice down, exposing him now will only cause dissatisfaction among the believers."
Markov laughed loudly: "I have long felt that there is something wrong with many so-called miracles, but I didn't expect that you can see through them at a glance."
These things have been exposed many times in later generations. In Li Yu's eyes, they are all inferior methods that can no longer be played badly.
It's just that the believers were immersed in the pious state of drinking "holy water", and they interrupted rashly, and then told them that they were actually drinking toilet water flushed from Rasputin's house, and they would definitely be beaten.
Several people held back their laughter as they boarded the carriage and headed towards Vasily Island, where St. Petersburg University is located, again.
On the way, we also passed the Winter Palace where the Tsar lived. The Winter Palace is located on the shore. After crossing the bridge, we are immediately at St. Petersburg University, which is very close.
To be precise, its full name should now be St. Petersburg Royal University. It was established together with the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and is the first university in Russia.
Markov first took Li Yu to the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics.
Since Lobachevsky, Russia has become a major country in mathematics. Until the 21st century, Russian mathematics is second to none in the world.
However, Lobachevsky was too ahead of his time. The non-Euclidean geometry he pioneered only attracted world attention 12 years after his death.
In the true sense, it was the Petersburg School founded by Chebyshev that laid the foundation for Russian mathematics.
Similar to the Pythagoras school in Greece, Chebyshev led his disciples Markov and Lyapunov to almost completely establish the status of Russian mathematics in the world.
In fact, Li Yu didn't dare to speak up in the Department of Mathematics, especially since the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics was the flagship major of St. Petersburg University.
For example, Einstein later had to be respectful to mathematicians Hilbert, Minkowski and others.
But most people probably have the illusion that since modern times, mathematicians are not as famous as physicists, chemists, and biologists.
Mainly because some of the content studied by early mathematicians can be learned in high school, such as Newton and Leibniz's calculus, Gauss's normal distribution, Euler's identity, Cartesian coordinate system, Lat Regardless of whether you remember Granger's mean value theorem or not, you can still talk about it.
But the development of mathematics in the mid-19th century, almost starting from the Poincaré era, or a little earlier, began to move towards areas such as group theory, number theory, and abstract algebra that ordinary people could not understand at all.
Of course, there are some special cases, such as some very simple problems in number theory, which are really famous. Fermat's last theorem and Goldbach's conjecture are so simple that countless civil scientists are inspired by Chen Jingrun to want to prove them.
In fact, if you take a brief look at their papers, you will find that you may not be able to understand them in your next life.
There is also the Riemann Hypothesis, which is now popular, but this is more difficult, so don’t think about it. Many people may not even know that this is also a number theory problem, studying the distribution of prime numbers.
As for many other famous mathematicians in the industry, their reputation in society is still much smaller than those who study physics and chemistry. Not many people even know that Wiles, who proved Fermat's last theorem, and Perelman, who proved the Poincaré conjecture, are super mathematical advances.
But people in the field of physics and chemistry certainly know how good mathematicians are, and they have to ask them for advice on many questions, and Einstein was no exception.
Fortunately, most of the current research conducted by the Petersburg School of Mathematics is in the fields of probability methods and differential equations, which are basically subjects that Li Yu is relatively familiar with and will be used in physics.
