He Couldn't Read the Math. So He Graded Wang Hong's English.

What happened

Wang Hong — 王虹 — proved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture and won the Fields Medal. Her MIT doctoral thesis runs 127 pages. In early August, a man on rednote read one of them: the acknowledgments.

王虹的英文表达像小学生。一篇致谢，重复用了那么多 I would like to thank，就没有西方人帮她稍微改一下吗？ “Wang Hong’s English reads like a primary schooler’s. One acknowledgments page, that many ‘I would like to thank’s — could no Westerner have given it a quick polish?”

When the first round of replies disagreed, he elaborated — and supplied the upgrades he had in mind:

只对她通篇重复用词 I would like to thank，说这是小学生水平。很多人喷我（上一篇）。其实，哪怕写写 I’ve been fortunate to have help from many quarters. 下面巴拉巴拉。。。。这种句子都是简单到不能简单了，就是常见表达，王虹都不知道写。稍微变变表达呀，王虹女士, please。 “My only point is her repeating ‘I would like to thank’ throughout — that’s primary-school level. Lots of people are roasting me (see previous post). Honestly, even something like ‘I’ve been fortunate to have help from many quarters,’ blah blah… the simplest possible sentences, stock phrases, and Wang Hong doesn’t know to use them. Vary the wording a little, Ms. Wang Hong, please.”

Note the credentials on display: his masterstroke replacement is an IELTS writing-template line. Note, too, his username — a riff on 武大郎 Wu Dalang, folklore’s most famous short man — which is about to become relevant, because the comment section went looking and found the post where he introduces himself:

人老实，话不多 / 身高 161.5 cm / 体重 82 KG / 喜欢 175 cm 以上的女生 ♥ “Honest guy, not talkative. Height 161.5 cm. Weight 82 KG. Into girls 175 cm and up ♥”

Someone reposted the whole affair with a one-word caption — 新鲜的 “fresh from the oven” — and 5,124 comments got to work.

What they’re saying

The verdict arrives in one name

新鲜的 “Fresh from the oven.” — the repost, 9,769 likes

😭😭😭想到了 “你知道回的四种写法吗”😭😭😭 ”😭😭😭 Took me straight to ‘So — do you know all four ways to write the character 回?’ 😭😭😭” — pinned reply, 28.1K likes, Australia

CONTEXT · 孔乙己 Kǒng Yǐjǐ — Lu Xun’s 1919 shabby scholar, the eternal Chinese byword for useless pedantry. His signature move: cornering people to ask whether they know all four ways to write the character 回 huí, “return” — a piece of knowledge with no possible use. The thread’s whole verdict, delivered in one name, 28.1K likes.

The IELTS incident

Then someone laid the simplest possible trap:

你水平这么高，雅思最少有12分吧🐷好厉害呀，向你取经 “With a level like yours, your IELTS must be at least a 12 🐷 Incredible. Teach me your ways.” — 2 likes, Thailand

63分 “63.” — the author himself, four minutes later

CONTEXT · IELTS bands run from 0 to 9. A 7 is solid, an 8 is excellent, a 9 is near-native. “At least a 12” was bait. He answered sixty-three.

他雅思63，让让他吧😹 “His IELTS is 63. Let the man through 😹” — 19.4K likes, Sichuan

笑得崩溃 “I’m crying laughing.” — 7,527 likes, Sichuan

The actual linguistics

Between rounds of laughter, the thread quietly produced better writing advice than the original post:

虽然但是，其实写论文就得这样写啊😅我写第一篇小论文的时候，因为还带着考试思维，一直在改变各种句式，换各种表达，用长难句啥的，被导师狠狠批了🍑🍑🍑事实上反而就得用各种简单简洁的表达，一直重复也没关系，写论文最重要的是你的内容清晰，而不是让别人看你的论文的时候，一直在做语法题。 “Okay but honestly, this IS how you write a paper 😅 My first paper, I still had exam brain — kept varying sentence patterns, swapping expressions, stuffing in long complex clauses — and my advisor tore me apart 🍑🍑🍑 Turns out you WANT plain, simple wording, and repetition is fine. What matters is that your content is clear — not that your reader feels like they’re doing grammar drills the whole way through.” — 468 likes, Guizhou

其实也不是论文的事儿，这是排比句…和中文一样的，一种提振情绪的写作手法而已 “It’s not even a thesis-writing thing. That’s anaphora… same as in Chinese — a rhetorical device that builds feeling.” — 70 likes, Hunan

他都体重大于身高了那还说啥 “His weight number is bigger than his height number. What is there left to say.” — Shandong

That last one marks the turn. The thread had two threads: one about English, and one about the man. The second one now took over — 好骂哈哈哈哈 “god-tier roast hahahaha”, as one reply cheered from the sidelines.

A comma’s worth of damage

人老 实话不多的正方体 “An honest man of few words. Also, a cube.” — 33.4K likes, Shanghai — the section’s top comment

是横着的长方体😭 “Correction: a rectangular block, lying down 😭” — 7,060 likes, Zhejiang

CONTEXT · The top comment is a knife hidden in punctuation. His profile opens 人老实，话不多 “honest guy, not talkative”. Move the comma one character left — 人老，实话不多 “old-ish, and honest words are in short supply” — and the same five characters flip from a virtue to an indictment. The comment runs with the second reading and appends 的正方体 “…shaped like a cube” — 161.5 cm and 82 kg being, geometrically speaking, roughly cubic. One comma, 33.4K likes.

对面这个身高偶尔也因为饲料和猪打过架吧 “At that height he’s surely fought a pig over feed once or twice.” — 12.6K likes, Guangdong

下雨都比别人晚两分钟知道。 “When it rains, he finds out two minutes after everyone else.” — 3,443 likes, the same commenter, going back in

好不容易从虹神127页的论文里找到点错误，可给他牛逼坏了 “Man finally digs one tiny slip out of Goddess Hong’s 127-page thesis and he’s absolutely beside himself.” — 1,167 likes, Shanghai

甚至不能算错误。。。。。。 “It doesn’t even count as a slip……” — 2,592 likes, Jiangsu

发完这篇就昂首挺胸的走到床底下了吧 “Posted this, then marched off chest-out, head-high — straight under the bed.” — 3,139 likes, Shandong

路上遇到个吉娃娃都是生死劫 “Every chihuahua he meets on the street is a near-death encounter.” — 2,006 likes, the same commenter

The same commenter kept going — a one-person production line: 这个身高好呀，万一真谈了女朋友出去吃饭旅游还能算儿童票 “The height has upsides — if the girlfriend ever materializes, he eats and travels on the child fare”; 偶尔还能去路口cos石墩子做做兼职 “he can pick up weekend shifts cosplaying a traffic bollard”; and, finally, 被恶灵附身的乐高积木 “a Lego brick possessed by an evil spirit.”

The people who actually know English

没在国外生活的人对英文的认知就是各种复杂长难句了… “People who’ve never lived abroad think English IS long complicated sentences…” — momo, 5,099 likes, Guangdong

他是一个圆柱体，是独特的物种 “He is a cylinder. A unique species.” — 1,365 likes, Thailand

也不用在国外生活过，大学期间有过全英环境都知道🤌 “You don’t even need to have lived abroad — anyone who did an all-English program at university knows this 🤌” — 154 likes, Guangdong

(That’s momo in the first slot — the shared alias worn by millions; the cylinder verdict arrived from a different taxonomy department. A third reply put it plainest: 对呀这是写致谢 又不是作家写文学著作🤡 “Right — it’s an acknowledgments page, not a work of literature 🤡”.)

Deeper in the thread, an honest question got an honest answer — the single most useful exchange in all 5,124 comments:

诶，我是真的想问一下，在国外交流的话就是重复用这种简单句吗。那考雅思口语的时候也可以这样嘛，会不会被考官嫌弃句型太简单呀 “Wait, genuine question — so abroad, day to day, you really do just repeat simple sentences like this? Can I do that in IELTS speaking too, or will the examiner mark me down?” — momo, 5 likes, Shanghai

日常交流当然是简单句为主，就像国人日常对话不会动不动甩长难句＋书面化表达；雅思本质是考试，是向考官展现自己的能力，所以过多使用简单句容易拿低分 “Daily conversation IS mostly simple sentences — same as Chinese people don’t lob long formal clauses at each other over lunch. But IELTS is a test: you’re there to display ability to an examiner, so leaning too hard on simple sentences does cost points.” — 219 likes, Hubei

Which is the whole affair in two comments: real English is simple; exam English performs. He graded a Fields Medalist’s real English against his exam template — and the thread graded him back:

他们写过致谢吗🐧🐧 “Have THEY ever written an acknowledgments page? 🐧🐧” — 606 likes, Hebei

没用过学信网这种新潮的网站 “They’ve never used xuexin.net. You know. That newfangled website.” — momo, 554 likes, Fujian

让人觉得是不是故意反串的程度。。。 “It’s reached the point where you wonder if he’s a plant doing a bit on purpose…” — 484 likes, Guangxi

CONTEXT · 学信网 xuéxìnwǎng, xuexin.net — China’s official, government-run degree-verification portal. Every genuine degree in the country is one search away. So “they’ve never used that newfangled website” is not a compliment — it is the insult: people with no diploma in the system have never had a reason to open the site. The comment runs a credentials check on the mockers and reports the result in one line.

The women’s division files its brief

线上骂骂也就算了，可不能和这种人线下争论，因为矮人弯腰捡石头比人类快得多 “Roast him online all you like, but never take the argument offline — dwarves bend down and pick up rocks far faster than humans do.” — 440 likes, Henan

四张420的卫生巾叠起来就比他高了 “Four 420mm sanitary pads stacked up are taller than he is.” — 6,247 likes, Yunnan

未必，因为卫生巾长度可能不合格🧱 “Not necessarily — the pads’ length might not be up to spec 🧱” — the reply, 2,365 likes, Jiangsu

CONTEXT · In late 2024, Chinese consumers discovered that many sanitary-pad brands measured shorter than the length printed on the box, setting off a nationwide measure-your-pads reckoning. Hence the correction: four 420s stack to 1.68m — taller than 161.5 cm — unless the pads are under spec too. A consumer-rights scandal, repurposed as a unit of height.

And one commenter skipped the jokes entirely, posting only belike： “belike:” — the Chinese internet’s format for filing a precedent plus a screenshot from another corner of the internet:

说句不好听的，我初中毕业，看过的书不比任何一个大学生少……英语四级已经考过了，教师资格证考过，电脑黑客技术的话，只学过一种编程方法，自己搞个小游戏还是没问题的 “Frankly, I only finished middle school but I’ve read more books than any university student… already passed CET-4, got my teaching certificate, and as for hacking — I’ve only studied one programming method, but building my own little game would be no problem.”

你难道不知道英语四级只有在校大学生才能考吗？我看你所有的话，只有初中毕业是真的 “You do know CET-4 can only be taken by enrolled university students? Of everything you’ve said, ‘middle school’ is the only part I believe.” — the reply, 242 likes

Same genre, different specimen: the confident reviewer, reviewed.

Review the reviewable

数学不点评，点评上英文了哈哈哈哈哈🤡 “Can’t review the math, so the English got reviewed instead hahahaha 🤡” — 589 likes, Zhejiang

数学看不懂 所以只能点评英语了😭 “Couldn’t read the math. The English was all that was left 😭” — Momo, 295 likes, Luxembourg

全文唯一能读懂的部分，可得让他们好好点评一下🤡 “The only part of the whole thesis they could read — of course it had to be thoroughly reviewed 🤡” — 2,040 likes, Beijing

哈哈哈哈，估计他自己写的英文都是上网查翻译的🤡 “Hahaha and odds are any English he writes himself comes out of an online translator 🤡” — 140 likes, Guangdong

丈母娘抱着稀罕了半天才发现不是孙子 “His future mother-in-law cradled him admiringly for a good while before realizing he wasn’t the grandson.” — 267 likes, Jiangsu

你这丈母娘还挺有劲儿，平常撸铁吗 “That’s one strong mother-in-law. Does she lift?” — the reply, 101 likes, Beijing

致谢想咋写咋写好吧😭人家外国人也没说有问题，要不自己写写看呢，也就能看懂致谢了😭 “A person gets to write her acknowledgments however she likes, alright 😭 The foreigners themselves never saw a problem with it. Maybe try writing one yourself — then you’d at least be able to READ an acknowledgments page 😭” — 107 likes, Jiangxi

161.5还有一个点五🤣很细节哦🐷 “161.5 — he kept the point five 🤣 Such attention to detail 🐷” — the same commenter, 84 likes

Two stragglers closed the measurements file: 体重＞身高🤭 “weight > height 🤭”, and 躺着比站着高 “taller lying down than standing up.”

What I see

The acknowledgments he red-penned end with Wang Hong thanking her parents, and one more person — for cooking dinner during the last year of a Fields-Medal thesis. That sentence needed no editing. Neither did the rest: as the thread kept pointing out, between the advisor Larry Guth and a committee of MIT professors, the number of native speakers who saw that page and found nothing to fix already constitutes a review — one this reviewer would not have passed.

He got a review anyway. Not of his English — of the impulse. Five thousand comments, and the one that ends the file isn’t a joke at all. It’s a meme card someone dropped with the number 16 and no further comment:

人强烈的自卑，会使你莫名其妙的，变得非常无礼 “Intense inferiority will make a person — inexplicably, and to everyone’s confusion — extremely rude.” — 697 likes, Jiangsu

He red-penned a Fields Medalist’s grammar. The internet red-penned his dating profile.

下次热搜见 — see you at the next hot search