Chapter 173
Translator: Dreamscribe
"What's Yu Seo-ha's side saying?"
"Their security is so tight there's no response at all. MIT already sent staff over, you know? Forget getting access, they said they'd only take written interviews once everything's finished..."
Camera vehicles were lined up in front of the Göttingen campus.
Germany's public broadcaster ARD, the BBC, CNN, and even minor outlets with names no one recognized. The commotion, which had started as an internal stir within the math community, had spread across social media and was churning out cult-like memes over the span of just a few days.
The broadcaster had hurriedly dispatched its Germany correspondent, Nam Gi-sun, to Göttingen. On the train, he made call after call, trying to get a read on the situation on the ground.
'They're proving the Riemann Hypothesis in real time?'
'World-class scholars have been holed up in Göttingen for days without even going home?'
'Could this be a scoop?'
Major foreign outlets were showing enormous interest.
He had a feeling he could pull a good story out of this, whatever it turned out to be. And since they were fellow Koreans, requesting an interview would be easy too. But this was a miscalculation.
"Ah, dammit! What am I supposed to do."
Yu Seo-ha was off-limits, of course, and so were the Team Apex members; even the heavyweight professors all turned down interviews, saying they were busy.
He felt like he was going to lose his mind from the frustration. But he couldn't go back empty-handed. He had to do something.
"Let's at least talk to the people outside."
He led the cameraman, trudging across the campus grounds.
At one edge of the lawn, in front of a flashy red tent, professors who looked Korean were gathered. They had a somewhat grubby look about them, as if they hadn't been able to wash properly.
They sat on folding chairs, wrestling with notebooks and pens. A few had laptops open on their laps, sipping coffee.
Around their necks hung ICM participant badges, but the light was too weak to make out the names.
"Excuse me. Would it be all right if I asked you something for a moment?"
One of the group lifted their head. A sharp-featured woman. Her expression said she was annoyed at the interruption. But he ignored it and pressed on resolutely.
"I'm a reporter for Korean broadcasting. Could you explain to our viewers what's happening inside right now?"
She adjusted her glasses wearily and said,
"They say the Riemann Hypothesis is about to be proven. For mathematicians, it's like a dream come true."
Gi-sun's eyes scanned her badge.
'KAIST professors? This works out nicely.'
"I've heard of it myself. It's one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics, isn't it? Professor Kim Ji-yoon, what's your outlook? Will it really be solved?"
Ji-yoon dropped her head and let out a deep sigh.
"...I'm not sure."
"Pardon?"
"I haven't fully understood it myself."
Her face was filled with self-reproach.
In the past, she had clearly been the one teaching them. But in just a few years, how had so much changed?
Not only the equations Seo-ha was writing out but even the lemma Su-jeong had supposedly come up with proved hard to grasp. She'd hurriedly slipped into the second group to catch up, but this was a theory of no ordinary complexity.
He handed the microphone to a middle-aged man who seemed to be with her.
"Could I trouble you for an introduction?"
"I'm Professor Park Chul-min of KAIST. I had a brief connection with Seo-ha as a chaperone at the IMO."
A flush of color came to Gi-sun's face.
"Really? This must stir up special feelings for you."
"It does. That little country boy..."
He seemed to be gazing off into the distance, lost in memories of the past.
"Everyone must have figured Seo-ha was an extraordinary kid. But no one expected it would come to this. And what's truly frightening..."
He broke off for a moment and looked at the camera.
"...is that his growth still hasn't ended. Seo-ha is clearly evolving. A few years ago, when he proved the Four Color Theorem, I marveled, 'Ah! Korea has produced a truly remarkable talent.'
It was an achievement worthy of a page in the history of mathematics. But that was a proof carried out within the framework of existing theory. And now..."
"And now?"
"...Today, for the first time, my own field felt foreign to me.
'The beauty of mathematics lies in its freedom.' It's something professors often say to their students. But I think I've only now truly understood what those words mean."
Professor Kim Ji-yoon nodded.
"In mathematics, small trends come around every twenty years. A shift of the center happens every fifty years. And roughly once a century, the entire paradigm changes.
Riemannian Geometry, Russell's Paradox, the Theory of Relativity, the Incompleteness Theorem. Modern mathematics is still an extension of these theories that emerged a century ago. But perhaps, right here and now, the mathematics of the next generation is being born... that's the thought that came to me."
Gi-sun swallowed hard.
"So this could be a historic moment."
Professor Park Chul-min laughed heartily.
"Hahaha! History always gets its name afterward. We call 1905, the year Einstein poured out four papers, the 'Miracle Year', don't we? I'm dying to know what they'll end up calling today's commotion someday."
Ji-yoon looked toward the campus building.
Windows whose lights hadn't gone out, a place where the world's finest scholars had gathered, unable to sleep.
"Even so."
Her voice cracked, as if her throat had tightened.
"As a fellow Korean, and as a teacher who once taught that boy, I'm so very proud."
The professors around her wore expressions brimming with emotion.
One of them grumbled.
"I still haven't understood it, so what do I do about the embarrassment?"
"Oh, come on. Three Major Math Prize winners are in there wrestling with it all night. When they nod, we just nod along too, don't we?"
"Hahaha!"
Reporter Nam looked around.
Word must have gotten out somehow, because not only professors but students' faces were visible too. Near the main gate, even tourists were gathering.
A food truck had pulled up at the campus entrance. Middle-aged professors rose and lined up in front of it. English, German, Korean, French, Japanese, Spanish: a jumble of languages drifted over. Their faces seemed full of anticipation and excitement.
"It's just like a festival."
A grand festival for mathematicians alone.
Maybe it was an occupational hazard, but an ominous premonition suddenly struck him.
'What happens if the proof fails?'
He shook his head to cast off the thought. Then he turned the camera and captured them on screen.
***
Creeeak-
The oak door opened again.
The buzzing lecture hall fell silent all at once.
Seo-ha came in.
His face looked more haggard than the day before. Instead of a white shirt, he wore a checkered button-down.
Step, step.
When he stood in front of the blackboard, the scholars in the lecture hall all straightened up in their seats at once. There was no longer an empty spot to be found anywhere. The aisles and stairs weren't enough either; people had packed all the way out into the corridor beyond the door.
They watched Seo-ha from a distance, as if it didn't matter that they couldn't see inside the hall.
"......"
"......"
An indescribable tension flowed through the lecture hall.
Seo-ha looked at nothing.
His eyes turned toward the blackboard. The two surfaces of equations he'd filled in so far. After scanning them for a moment, Seo-ha picked up a piece of chalk.
Scratch-
The third surface began to fill.
"Hsss!"
Everyone in their seats sucked in a breath at the same time.
Andrew, sitting at the same desk, stared at the blackboard intently. From debating with the professors all night, the skin under his eyes was hollow and shadowed, but his mind was honed sharper than ever.
The notebook he had open was filled black. He had already sketched out the structure of Seo-ha's argument in his head. Now he was beginning to faintly see where the climax would come.
'It'll be today.'
It was the intuition of a man who had spent his whole life battling unsolved problems.
Theo stood with his back against the wall of the lecture hall, arms folded.
He chuckled inwardly at how markedly the atmosphere had changed from last time. He could tell from their expressions.
'Looks like they studied hard.'
Not all of them, but a considerable number were following the logic.
Equations filling the blackboard. Now Seo-ha would run in a straight line toward the heart of it.
"Theo."
Su-jeong slid up beside him and spoke.
"Yeah."
"Will it finish today?"
"Who knows. Why the face?"
Her cheeks were flushed red.
"I don't know. Why am I so on edge?"
Su-jeong pressed a hand to her chest. Was it anticipation, or worry? No matter how hard she tried to calm down, the pounding wouldn't stop.
Cecilia seemed to feel the same way, unable to hide her anxious expression.
She prayed desperately.
'I don't need any dramatic theatrics. Just please, hurry up and finish it!'
The afternoon was passing.
The chalk had worn down short. Ben handed him a new piece from beside him. He had already repeated this dozens of times over.
Just as the professors' concentration was reaching its limit, Andrew clenched his fist.
"Right here!"
It was the point he'd imagined the night before.
Seo-ha's argument was preparing for its final leap. The zeros of the zeta function defined on noncommutative space. On the geometric manifold Seo-ha had created, they were trying to converge into a single spectrum. Then the identity of the operator could be found.
Scratch scratch.
Seo-ha's hand sped up.
The proof was heading toward its climax. Equations pulled in equations, arguments absorbed arguments, and at the very moment the final structural member was about to be fitted into the colossal structure, vast as the universe.
"...Huh?"
Seo-ha's fingertips stopped.
The gears that had been turning flawlessly in his head slipped out of alignment.
The operator that had been arranging the primes over the noncommutative space diverged into imaginary numbers at the decisive critical point. The logic stopped flowing smoothly and got caught in a whirlpool, beginning to spin in place.
Scratch, scratch.
The sound of the chalk grew rough. A deep crease formed between Seo-ha's brows.
A bewildered murmur spread among the watching professors.
"Is he stuck?"
"That part is a region that still hasn't been properly defined in modern mathematics. Surely not here..."
"The domain doesn't close."
The logic hadn't collapsed. If anything, the theory was almost excessively perfect.
The scholars felt a stab of déjà vu, because beautiful theories so often deceived people, luring them in as though this were the answer, only to drive them at last into a dead end.
Hugo and Laura of the '512 Brigade', who had become a couple at some point, both clapped their hands over their mouths at the same time.
'Riemann's Demon!'
It was the same pattern.
The demon that swallowed a theorem whole at the very last moment, just when it seemed flawlessly perfect. The terror from back then came flooding back. Laura trembled with fear.
Andrew squeezed his eyes shut.
Every century-defining problem had a final door. A door that revealed itself from a direction no one anticipated, at the very moment the end seemed within reach.
He had been through the same thing himself. In 1993, a fatal error was found in the paper he had ambitiously unveiled. That alone cost him a full two years.
With the help of his student Richard, he had barely managed to resolve it in the form of a joint paper. The frustration and sense of loss he had felt then were beyond words. He hoped this young and boundlessly promising mathematician would never suffer the same pain he had.
'Is this truly a realm that humanity is not permitted to enter?'
His chest felt so tight he could hardly breathe.
Su-jeong looked ahead with worried eyes.
"Seo-ha..."
Theo kept his mouth clamped shut, his expression hardened. Ben anxiously opened and closed the box of chalk over and over. Sri, hands clasped, was offering up a prayer, calling on the goddess Namagiri.
"Good lord."
Cecilia's gaze wavered. The Great Demon King, who had fallen into a groggy state, was playing his final move, trying to swallow the hero whole.
Everyone's gaze turned toward Seo-ha.
Thump, thump.
The sound of a pulse growing faster and faster.
His heart was pumping with all its might, ferrying the fuel his thinking required. Even Seo-ha hadn't anticipated this. A realm God had hidden away beyond the reach of human intuition, the Wall of Incompleteness.
'Gödel, is this exactly what you were trying to say?'
The equations on the blackboard coiled like a snake and writhed as if mocking Seo-ha. The logic wouldn't close. At the contact point where the classical barrier of number theory meshed with noncommutative geometry, an inexplicable repulsive force arose, pushing everything away.
Snap.
When he bore down, the chalk in his grip broke.
Seo-ha's field of vision turned red. The Ducky in his head glared at the enormous snake whose end couldn't even be gauged. He had endured for far too long.
Scratch, scratch, screeeech-
In a single breath, Seo-ha began writing equations across the blackboard.
A spine-chilling scrape of friction.
Seo-ha simply could not tolerate this monster called incompleteness that was blocking humanity's path.
*****
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