Chapter 176
Translator: Dreamscribe
Reporter Nam Gi-sun entered his hotel room and opened his laptop.
His deadline was the next morning; there was plenty of time. He brewed a strong cup of coffee, took a sip, and rested his hands on the keyboard.
Blink, blink.
On the white word processor screen, the cursor blinked.
What kind of headline should he go with?
Korean Genius Mathematician, Yu Seo-ha, Solves the Greatest Problem in Mathematics?
The Riemann Hypothesis, Conquered at Last?
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.
He jabbed the backspace key, roughly deleting what he'd written.
He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. The fluorescent light buzzed. The peculiar charm of an old hotel. He shook his head hard.
"Think, Nam Gi-sun. This isn't it!"
Dry, cookie-cutter lines like those couldn't capture even a tenth of the overwhelming scene he had witnessed. Even now, when he closed his eyes, the events of that afternoon came back to him vividly.
"It really was a magnificent sight."
The haughty geniuses who commanded the world, parting like the Red Sea to clear a path, then quietly bowing their heads toward the boy who had collapsed in exhaustion.
As a science journalist, he understood the inner workings of academia to some degree.
The miraculous moment when mathematicians, the same ones forever busy tearing into and criticizing each other's logic, broke into a tearful standing ovation. And even the fierce fury those mathematicians had unleashed at the reporter who dared to throw out an impertinent question.
Clack, clack.
Gi-sun's fingers finally began to strike the keys.
Heh.
It came to him. This was the headline.
The corner of his mouth lifted.
Clack-clack.
He immediately began writing out the body of the article.
As he wrote, Gi-sun's heart blazed hot all over again. As a reporter whose job was to deliver objective facts, he tried to keep his emotions out of it as much as he could, but on the other hand, he wanted to share with his readers the overwhelming emotion and thrill he had felt in that moment.
After writing for a long while, he suddenly stopped and looked out the window.
Göttingen University, blanketed in deep darkness. Even at this very hour, the sleepless intellects there were surely waging a fierce war inside their tents, struggling to decipher the theory the boy had tossed their way.
Would his readers really understand? Just how absurd, how impossible this whole thing was.
"What kind of monster has crawled out of Korea?"
In his years as a journalist, he had seen the base side of human nature countless times. He had grown cynical about people more than once or twice. He never imagined that he, of all people, would end up writing an article filled with such pure admiration.
The next morning, an article of a wholly different caliber from the usual wire-service rewrites was posted on the front page of the portal.
[O Crown Prince of Mathematics, Receive Our Reverence.]
While the internet was plastered with translated wire stories along the lines of, 'MIT's Yu Seo-ha has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. If his proof is accepted, he will receive a prize of one million dollars', his piece delivered a sense of being there on an entirely different level.
An immersion that made readers feel as if they had seen the place with their own eyes. His writing carried the acrid air and the chalk smell of a centuries-old lecture hall.
「...The oak doors of the auditorium opened, and he walked in. Why did a hush fall over everyone at the sight of Seo-ha? Because in him they saw nothing but a seeker thirsting solely after truth.
Andrew Wiles, standing at the very summit of the mathematical world, along with countless other winners of the Three Major Prizes, and the tenured professors of the world's finest universities. These men, who must have lived their whole lives in lofty dignity, greeted Seo-ha in wrinkled shirts, unwashed for days.
The night before, too, they had pitched their tents on the lawn, exposed to the cold dew.
For what?
Because they did not want to miss even a single line of the formulas that young seeker wrote on the blackboard.」
The article arranged three photographs from the scene to exquisite effect.
He had followed the KAIST faculty into the lecture hall on the condition that no photos be taken, but he couldn't just sit on his hands. Using a tiny hidden camera meant for undercover work, he secretly captured the scene. The photos were low-resolution and even out of focus, but that only made them feel more like the real thing.
The first photo showed Seo-ha agonizing in front of an enormous blackboard, a piece of chalk gripped in his hand.
The second showed elderly scholars arguing fiercely across the Göttingen campus, now dotted with tents of every color.
And the last was a scene in which, after he had finished the entire proof, an exhausted Seo-ha was carried out on someone's back while roughly a thousand masters laid their hands over their hearts in unison and bowed their heads to him.
「Mathematics is a merciless discipline. A single counterexample can hurl a lifetime's work into the trash. That is why these people never take another's theory on faith.
But that one moment was the exception. Though the verification had not even begun, a professor who is an authority on cryptography told me that everyone had recognized it at first sight. That beautiful structure was order itself, shaped by the universe.
The whole time I was writing this piece, I struggled to choose my words. In an age when the word 'genius' is thrown around carelessly, that word is too light for him. 'Great' feels somewhat grandiose for one still so young.
People often call Carl Friedrich Gauss the King of Mathematics. So I will call Yu Seo-ha this.
O Crown Prince of Mathematics, descended upon our age, please, receive our reverence!」
Within two hours of being posted, the article passed a million views. But some of the public's reactions were not so kind to Seo-ha.
└Okay, the Fields Prize, I'll give him that. And yeah, it's an incredible achievement, that's true too. But how much does this reporter even know about math to be making such a fuss? It'll take years just to verify it, and he's already calling him a crown prince?
└I personally know more than ten. Of who? People who announced they'd proven the Riemann Hypothesis. I get that you're hyped, but tone it down, reporter.
The Riemann Hypothesis was the graveyard of mathematicians.
Not long ago, there had been an incident in which Michael Atiyah, a great scholar who had won both the Fields Prize and the Abel Prize, announced that he had proved the Riemann Hypothesis, only to bow out in bitter defeat. The press had made a big fuss back then too, and ended up with egg on its face.
The public had grown sick of the pattern of periodically published 'The Riemann Hypothesis Conquered!' articles, retracted a few months later.
└I'm a math PhD student, and I'd bet something like my whole salary that around next year a 'Fatal Error Found' article is going to drop.
└A grad student's salary? So basically you're betting nothing ᄏᄏᄏᄏ
But as people connected to the math world stepped in, the mood began to shift.
└The armchair mathematicians are out in force again ᄏᄏᄏ Did you even read the article? It says the place is crawling with old-timers like Andrew Wiles. You think those geezers are camping out on the lawn because they're idiots?
└I'm a postdoc in a math department. The mood is a little different this time. My advisor is an unbelievably hard-to-please man, and he still hasn't come back from Germany.
└I'm in Göttingen right now ᄏᄏᄏᄏ You're only saying that because you don't know what it's like over here. The monster-tier professors are already treating it as a done deal that the Riemann Hypothesis is solved.
└ Yeah, otherwise it makes no sense that all these big-name mathematicians are reacting the way they are. I hear MIT is going nuts too? According to an exchange student over there, it's already a full-on party.
└Is some kinda big thing actually going down here? Heart's pounding.
Even members of the public who normally had no interest in math whatsoever joined the fray, and the back-and-forth raged on. Skeptics calling it an overblown piece drunk on gukppong [TL: excessive nationalistic pride] clashed head-on with defenders insisting that this time it was real.
With criticism, mockery, and praise all mixed together, the internet burned hot. And Reporter Nam's article was translated into multiple languages, going on to take over overseas communities as well.
└Tsk tsk! They say a prophet is never honored in his hometown, and sure enough, their faith is lacking. Become a citizen here instead, Yu Seo-ha!
└Right? If they knew Seo-ha even a little, they'd know he's never once made a claim that turned out to be wrong. The math department kids are probably already busy teabagging Harvard ᄏᄏᄏ
***
A week had passed since the day Seo-ha completed the proof.
"Don't tell me they erased the blackboard?"
Professors who had only just arrived in Göttingen came rushing breathlessly toward the lecture hall, shouting.
The proof was finished, yet the population of the tent village in front of the auditorium hadn't dwindled in the slightest. That was because the new arrivals overwhelmingly outnumbered those heading home.
Taxis streaming out of the airport pulled up before the campus one after another, pouring out mathematicians.
"Don't worry. The university put up a special glass partition around the blackboard."
A postdoc researcher who had arrived earlier said this smugly, as if to ask how they could not know that.
Normally, once a proof of a century-class problem was published, the verification alone took years. That was true of Fermat's Last Theorem, and it was true of the Poincaré Conjecture.
Experts in every field, scattered across the globe, would rack their brains looking for holes in the logic. When a question came up, they would write to the author of the paper, or to an expert in the field, demanding an answer, then review it all over again, a tedious game of ping-pong.
And Seo-ha's proof, no less, was a theory that fused number theory, topology, analysis, geometry, quantum mechanics, and every other abstruse field of modern mathematics into one.
"Wow! Just fully understanding this is going to take ages, isn't it? And how long will the verification take on top of that?"
"Still, at least here and now there's no need to sit around waiting for emails, is there?"
The reason the scholars couldn't bring themselves to leave.
Right now, more than a thousand of the top authorities in every field, including winners of the Fields Prize, the Abel Prize, and the Wolf Prize, were gathered in Göttingen.
If a question came up, one could simply grab the trouser leg of the great scholar in the very next tent and ask. It was, quite literally, an environment one could only have dreamed of.
President Brenner, who had climbed to the roof of the main building to watch it all, gripped the railing tightly.
Beneath his white hair fluttering in the wind, the rims of his eyes had flushed red. The essence of human intellect, gathered together and boiling over like an enormous furnace. He had never thought he would live to see such a sight.
"Are you watching this? Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert."
He wiped away the tears welling at the corners of his wrinkled eyes and looked up at the sky. An overwhelming emotion surged through him like a tidal wave.
"The center of the mathematical world has finally returned to Göttingen."
A young mathematician who had come from a distant foreign land, following the traces Riemann left behind.
Chasing the light he gave off, geniuses from all over the world had once again sought out this old university. He shivered at the sight of Göttingen's heart, which had stood still for a full century, now beating powerfully once more.
He raised his phone and gave his secretary an instruction.
"Please see to it that Seo-ha and Team Apex have no discomfort during their stay. Make sure they can remain here as long as possible."
***.
A hotel in downtown Göttingen.
After a week, Seo-ha had fully recovered his strength.
His face, after a deep sleep, was brimming with curiosity and energy. Ducky, too, having sated its terrible hunger, was sleeping peacefully.
"Should we head out soon?"
"What about writing up the paper?"
Theo asked.
Countless scholars who hadn't been able to come here were waiting for Seo-ha's paper.
"That's just a matter of typing it up anyway. More than that, I'm curious how they're picking apart my geometry. If there's a part where they're stuck, I'd like to help."
The moment Seo-ha appeared on campus, the scholars all grabbed their pens and came swarming.
"Seo-ha! In Lemma 4, how did you handle the curvature of this space?"
"Is this the correct convergence condition for the spectrum in noncommutative space?"
Questions poured in from every direction.
Eyes sparkling, Seo-ha plunged in among them. Marker in hand, he ranged about freely in every direction, explaining the structure of the space he had created. Team Apex, too, joined Seo-ha in fierce debate with them.
And in the course of it, the mathematicians gathered in Göttingen came to have a mysterious experience.
"...Huh?"
A professor from Oxford who specialized in partial differential equations let out a gasp as he stared at the whiteboard.
He was not a Riemann Hypothesis expert. He had simply been watching, fascinated by the new geometric tool used in Seo-ha's proof. But then...
"Excuse me, Seo-ha. That resonance condition for the operator you just showed. Does it still hold if I plug it into this equation?"
Seo-ha nodded as if it were obvious.
"Of course. This space isn't confined to the integers, after all. If you swap the Hamiltonian operator out for a wave function... hmm, at this part the energy won't diverge; it'll bundle together into a sheaf instead."
"Good heavens..."
The professor's hands trembled as he pulled out a notebook and scribbled formulas like a man possessed. A problem that had tormented him for a full five years melted away like soft butter the instant it met the new geometry Seo-ha had created.
Seo-ha's geometric world was not a key custom-made merely to find the zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function. As its scope expanded into regions modern mathematics had never managed to encompass, the floodgates opened in field after field that had been blocked until then.
"M-me too!"
"Would you take a look at this one as well, just once?"
The Egg of Columbus.
Something impossible to imagine until someone blazed the trail, but once they realized the path existed, Seo-ha's theory was, to those geniuses, nothing less than a treasure trove of inexhaustible possibilities.
"This is a total gold mine."
The words a young postdoc from Korea let slip without thinking.
Seo-ha scratched his head, looking flustered amid the throng of scholars pressing in on him, but a happy smile played at his lips. He was simply glad that his mathematics could help someone.
Watching the scene from afar, Andrew Wiles and Whitman let out incredulous laughs.
"Shouldn't we open a course at MIT next semester? And give it a suitably impressive title, too."
"I suppose we should. It'll cause another uproar. A professor at MIT in his teens... it's unheard of."
Would he be able to teach students well?
A question that left no real alternative, for the only person in the world who could write this course's textbook and deliver its lectures was Seo-ha, and Seo-ha alone.
The two masters looked at each other and burst into delighted laughter.
*****
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