In fact, Zhang Shou didn't see Mr. Song at all. It was wishful thinking to find someone he knew among the nearly a thousand people, unless he knew the other person's position completely, like Lu Sanlang and the Third Prince who sat next to him before.
This was because not all the students of the Imperial College were gathered here today. Except for the Ruxing Hall, the other halls were closed for the time being. Otherwise, if all of them were gathered together, plus the candidates, there would be more than a thousand people. Considering that if there were more people, a stampede would occur if one was not careful, the students of the other five halls gave up their seats.
But the compensation for those students who missed the lectures was even simpler - Zhou Jijiu conveyed the emperor's promise and asked the four mountain masters and Dr. Zhang to give a few more lectures in each hall. For the emperor, this was just a matter of lip service.
The four mountain masters would only think it was a great honor... except Zhang Shou, who would think it was a huge chore. Because they couldn't say the same thing every time, it would be too troublesome!
Regardless of what he thought, standing in this spot where everyone was paying attention, Zhang Shou had mixed feelings, but he was not too scared. After all, he was not a 17-year-old boy from the countryside. He was used to big scenes and could naturally handle the situation well. So after looking around at everyone, he nodded and smiled kindly.
Not to mention that Mr. Song thought that Zhang Shou was smiling at him, many people mistakenly believed that this doctor of the Imperial College was looking at him and nodding and smiling at him specifically.
Only a very few experienced people like Dean Yue, Dean Xiao and Dean Xu know that this kind of gaze and smile that others think is paying special attention to them requires long-term practice to reach this level.
As for Chief Hong Shan, he was sulking as soon as he stepped down from the stage and didn't notice Zhang Shou's actions after he came on stage at all.
After greeting, Zhang Shou said with a smile, "Just now the four deans have talked a lot to you. I didn't want to show off my skills in front of the seniors, but now that I'm here, I can't just say hello and leave. As everyone knows, I'm now the director of the Jiuzhang Hall of the Imperial College. I wanted to talk to you about the arithmetic classics, but once I start talking about those abstruse things, it's easy to go too far."
"Since the reopening of Jiuzhang Hall, some people have often asked, what is the use of mathematics? In a small sense, it is just to check the accounts and spend within the income. In a big sense, it is just to unify the taxes and land in the world. But is it really just that?"
He paused, his voice became sonorous and powerful. "In the era of the tribes that ate raw meat and drank blood, if you didn't know how to count, you couldn't calculate how many days the prey could keep you full, and you couldn't survive the long winter. In the era of barter, it seems that there was no currency that is now regarded as a copper-smelling thing. Everyone was self-sufficient and the surplus was used for exchange, but people still needed to use numbers to estimate the value of goods."
"After the Hundred Schools of Thought, the Qin and Han dynasties unified the country. Whether it was standardizing the wheel gauge, writing system, building bridges, roads, and ships, or controlling floods, building cities, measuring fields, or the calendar, all of them were inseparable from mathematics, and all of them were inseparable from those simple numbers. It was these simple numbers that helped people solve many practical problems."