Chapter 209
Translator: Dreamscribe
[Word is Yu Seo-ha showed up at a study café in Daejeon?]
-If it's Daejeon, the Gifted High School and KAIST kids are gonna deploy en masse. The group chats are going nuts right now.
└Wait, why Daejeon and not Seoul?
└He's from Okcheon. Maybe he came because it's close to his hometown?
└It's right near the KMO test site in Daejeon. Apparently Shin Woo-hyun is with him. Looks like he came because of his younger sister.
└The café owner says he isn't taking any more customers today. Somebody filmed it from outside and posted it. Looks like Yu Seo-ha is writing something on the wall.
└My professor just bolted out of the room ㅋㅋㅋ
└For real? Should I head over now? I want to get my paper signed.
└It's not that kind of vibeㅋㅋㅋ It's on the ground floor and there are already dozens of people watching from outside. It's only going to get worse.
An era when mathematics stood in the spotlight.
Because of Seo-ha, the public had come to feel real warmth toward mathematicians and researchers in the basic sciences. The broadcasting industry was currently at war over booking any scholar with a name.
Much the same as the days when men who cooked had been all the rage.
But Yu Seo-ha, the number one name on every booking list, had no interest in television whatsoever, so the public's curiosity went unsatisfied and only kept swelling.
"This is awkward."
Woo-hyun looked outside with a troubled expression.
He had thought that covering every wall with poster paper would block the view of the inside, but the glass door turned out to be the problem. The snow was falling harder now, and people stood lined up outside the door.
At first there had been five or six. Students in Gifted High School uniforms, undergrads in KAIST jackets, young men with cameras. Then, before he knew it, the number had swelled into the dozens. Leaving people standing outside in below-freezing weather, in the snow no less, sat badly with him.
He glanced over at Seo-ha.
Scritch.
The wall, about half filled.
Not even Seo-ha himself would know exactly how much longer it would take.
'It should be fine. He doesn't look like he'd lose focus over it.'
Woo-hyun walked over to the owner.
"Please let them come inside. And put out some hot chocolate or coffee, something like that."
"Would that really be all right?"
"Yes. If someone catches the flu standing out there, it'll be a disaster. And if any more show up, we could have a safety incident. But be sure to warn them that anyone who makes a scene will be put out."
"R... right, understood!"
People filed in, muffling their footsteps.
Kim Chan-sung, the young KAIST professor whose failure to make it to the Auditorium had been the regret of his life. Breathing hard, he claimed a seat in the corner of the café.
Only once the frost on his glasses melted did his view finally clear. He looked around.
"What a sight."
A fervent fan of Yu Seo-ha, he had made the pilgrimage to the seminar room at the Gifted High School more than once.
Walls papered over with poster sheets, and Yu Seo-ha's marker racing across them without hesitation.
'And the handwriting is good, too!'
Numbers and symbols of just the right size went down as neatly as if a printer had put them there.
A truth known only among mathematicians. Handwriting said more than one would expect.
Even in the digital age of the twenty-first century, they insisted on writing by hand. The main reason was that entering numbers and symbols on a keyboard was less than convenient, but the bigger reason was probably that writing by hand sorted out the thinking in one's head. Naturally, a person's mental state surfaced in their handwriting.
'Can he see the road ahead already?'
Lines and numbers extending without a moment's hesitation. Odds were the theory had already come to a complete conclusion inside Seo-ha's head.
Before long, though, his admiration turned to bewilderment.
'Computation Theory? But something about it is different. Wait, why does this connect here?'
He was a scholar promising enough to have been appointed a Full Professor at KAIST in his thirties, yet he could barely follow even the concepts behind the expressions Seo-ha was laying out.
"Excuse me, Professor. Do you happen to understand that?"
The man seated beside him spoke in something close to a whisper.
It was 'MathHolic', an influencer with a subscriber count unrivaled among math YouTubers. They had met a few times at events and conferences, and he had even appeared on the man's channel.
"Ah, ahem! I only got here partway through, so..."
Chan-sung turned his eyes aside, embarrassed.
A strange silence spread through the café. Even with the place packed full, the only things audible were the marker and the wind-driven snow. When someone set down a mug of hot chocolate, two or three people flinched and turned to look.
Scritch.
The blank space on the wall was shrinking.
MathHolic was beside himself. Something extraordinary was unmistakably happening, and he couldn't understand a bit of it. There didn't even seem to be anyone here who could.
He rose quietly and made his way over to Woo-hyun.
"Seonsaengnim, would it be all right if I went live? It's too much of a waste for only us to see this."
Woo-hyun let out a short laugh at that.
It was the look of a man asking who this guy thought he was fooling, but his face slowly turned serious.
"Hmm."
'Seo-ha is on active service right now. The Ministry of National Defense could try to claim copyright.'
This was research done on a weekend, outside duty hours, in a private space.
A pure product of intellect, drawn entirely out of Seo-ha's head with no equipment or data paid for by the national budget.
'There's a decent chance of winning that fight.'
He hadn't majored in law, but as an instructor sensitive to copyright issues, he had as much knowledge as was needed to mount a defense.
'It would be worth leaving a record of this as evidence.'
Surely the government wouldn't go that far, but there was no harm in taking out insurance.
If the equations Seo-ha was writing went public in real time, the Ministry would lose any pretext for locking them away as a 'state secret'. Even if they tried to claim ownership, they would have to weather social and international condemnation. And of course MIT wouldn't sit still either.
The calculation came out clean.
"You can start the stream."
"Sorry?"
MathHolic's eyes went wide at the unexpected answer.
"But make it live. Push the resolution as high as it will go. Every single character of those equations has to be visible."
"Just leave it to me!"
His hands were shaking.
He hurriedly pulled a tripod and a camera out of his bag.
The moment he connected the gear to the network and hit the stream button, the thousands of viewers who had already heard the news and been waiting came pouring in like a waterfall.
[URGENT: Yu Seo-ha Currently Developing Unpublished Equations at a Certain Café in Daejeon]
The chat window dissolved into chaos in an instant.
Messages scrolled past at a speed no one could possibly read.
Just as Woo-hyun had asked, MathHolic locked the camera's focus onto the wall. The 4K high-resolution lens scanned the equations without missing a single one.
"Um... could I possibly ask you to do the commentary?"
He asked Woo-hyun with a sheepish look.
He had flipped the stream on without thinking it through, and now it occurred to him that there was no one to fill the audio. He himself held a master's in mathematics from a prestigious university, but what was written on those walls was something far beyond the range of what he could grasp.
Jingle-
Just then, a group of people burst into the café.
Outside the door was a sea of gathering bodies, but the crowd had recognized their faces and opened a path for them.
Woo-hyun jerked his chin toward them.
"The right people just happen to have walked in."
"Whoa, incredible!"
Su-jeong came in at the head of the group.
Being the weekend, she had plans to meet up with her high school friends for the first time in ages. But the moment she was about to step out the door, a single photo posted in the Team Apex group chat turned her steps around.
Theo, Sri, and Ben came in behind her. Breathing hard, they checked on Seo-ha's condition first.
'Thank goodness. He still looks all right.'
Theo let out a sigh of relief.
With his worry eased, he finally took in his surroundings. The four of them walked slowly along, looking over the equations written on the walls.
"Huh?"
Seo-ha was about to break through a section that had been blocked for quite a while. Startled, Su-jeong nearly cried out.
Survival Cost Calculation.
Seo-ha's marker slid across the poster paper, tracing a smooth curve. Logic with every kind of theory condensed into it. To undo that intricately tangled knot, Seo-ha had introduced a variation on Yu-Riemann Geometry.
Su-jeong drew in a quiet breath.
'I think I can see it. The whole picture. Where his theorem is heading.'
MathHolic edged over to her, hesitant.
"Lim Su-jeong-nim? I'm a YouTuber, MathHolic. Do you happen to know me?"
Su-jeong's eyes lit up.
"Of course! I'm a subscriber!"
The biggest channel in Korean mathematics!
His real value lay in his connections. With his trademark nerve and easy charm, he had pulled off the feat of booking Nobel and Fields Prize laureates from overseas. Of course, scholars starved for public attention had fallen for it completely the moment they heard he was a famous influencer with over a million subscribers.
"Really? What a relief! Could I ask you to do the commentary today? We have a huge number of viewers watching, and nobody here, myself included, has any idea what's going on."
Su-jeong's expression hardened. She hadn't thought that far in her rush to get here, but what was happening in this place was not normal.
"W... wait a moment! I need to check something first."
"I'll explain that part."
A voice came from behind.
Woo-hyun came over and filled the whole team in on what had happened to Seo-ha that day. Theo gave him a thumbs-up.
"That was quick thinking. It's definitely going to help us a great deal."
MathHolic was going over the equipment with his staff.
Having a producer and a professional cameraman on hand was exactly the scale one would expect from a major YouTuber.
"So, can I go on the broadcast?"
"I don't mind."
Su-jeong peered into a mirror and lightly smoothed her tousled hair with her hand.
Today's outfit was a black overcoat with a crisp brown skirt.
Her makeup happened to have gone on well, too.
Hair, okay.
With a haughty look on her face, Su-jeong walked toward the camera, heels clicking.
"I'll do the commentary."
"Are you serious?"
Woo-hyun slipped in a word.
"You're in luck. She's probably the only person in this country who can explain that in Korean right now."
Under professional hands, a makeshift studio was set up in no time at all.
He looked into the camera with a meaningful smile.
"Hello there, subscribers. Today we're broadcasting live from a very special scene, and this person right beside me! I've brought you none other than researcher Lim Su-jeong of Team Apex!"
└Whoa. Why is she so pretty? Are we even allowed to have someone this distinguished on a shabby little channel like this?
└Noona, how old are you?
└Those proportions though ㅋㅋㅋ her face is so tiny
└Boss! Hand the channel over to her right now! No, wait, noona, just start a channel of your own. We'll all move over.
└What in the worldㅋㅋㅋ I thought this channel only had balding middle-aged dudes on it
"You people, honestly! Let me have a day like this. Enough with the fawning! Let's hold on to a little dignity here. I'm embarrassed for all of us."
Praise poured down.
It was a sensation she had forgotten for quite a while. Back in middle and high school it had been an everyday thing.
The envious, admiring looks she used to draw walking down the hallway.
Years of grinding away inside a lab, day in and day out.
There were so many brilliant people on the team that she had never had a chance to feel this way.
Su-jeong's confidence gauge filled all the way to max.
She looked into the camera lens and gave it a cool smile.
"I'm Lim Su-jeong, mathematician."
Su-jeong shot MathHolic a sidelong glance, urging him to hurry up and introduce her properly.
'It's not impressive if I have to say it myself!'
A YouTuber with max-level social radar.
He picked the line up smoothly.
"Ahem! That was a very modest introduction, but Lim Su-jeong-nim's credentials are frankly ridiculous. Just search her name on Google and... wow! Your jaw hits the floor, I'm telling you. For those who don't know her, we've put together a quick summary of her career."
Photos and text, hastily edited by the producer, went up on the screen.
[Korea's first two-time consecutive IMO gold medalist]
[Commended as top performer in every subject at the Gifted High School]
[Early graduation from the Gifted High School and top-ranked admission to KAIST]
[Admitted to the MIT Department of Mathematics and graduated with honors]
[Core researcher at the Team Apex Lab]
[Designer of the causal analysis algorithm for New York's 'Project Oracle']
[Co-author of the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis]
[Co-developer of Utopia, the next-generation Post-Quantum Cryptography]
A staggering record, laid out alongside file photos.
The viewers' astonishment never let up.
└Just how good at studying is she ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└There was a résumé this insane in Korea?
"Everyone. There's one more important fact."
MathHolic looked at his viewers with a stunned expression. He spoke in a trembling voice.
"This woman... is only twenty-three years old."
└ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└I thought she looked young, but she really is young
└While everyone else is barely finishing undergrad, she's piling up Fields Prize level achievements
└I wish they'd list Yu Seo-ha's credentials too
└You'd faint if you saw them
'Ahh, this really is nice.'
Wearing a face that said none of it fazed her, Su-jeong lifted her chin toward the camera, ever so slightly. But she soon collected herself and looked over toward Seo-ha.
She was turning over in her mind how to convey the fact that the Turing Machine, the very foundation of modern computer science and Computation Theory, might be torn down today by Seo-ha.
*****
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