Chapter 213
Translator: Dreamscribe
Silence hung over the studio. Marcel was the first to speak.
"An interesting line of thought. What might have come of Ramanujan if he had grown up in a proper environment? It's a question mathematicians have been imagining for a very long time."
Clara nodded.
"If we're measuring purely by the size of the talent, he'd be competing with Newton for first place in all of history. Now that I think about it, Newton wasn't a particularly diligent mathematician either."
Evan let out a loud laugh.
"Hahaha! A Newton who never got lost in alchemy and theology, a Ramanujan given a good environment. Just imagining it makes my heart race. If that had been the case, what could the two of them have accomplished?"
Anton's expression turned meaningful.
"I couldn't say for certain, but I'm sure of one thing. The world would look nothing like it does now. And we may already know someone who will make that hypothetical a reality. Give it a few years and our viewers will see that I wasn't exaggerating."
Evan looked into the camera and spoke in a gentle voice.
"If what you say is true, Doctor, then perhaps we're witnessing the moment a new page turns in the history of mathematics. My sincere thanks to our three guests for taking time out of their busy schedules."
Less than an hour after the broadcast aired, social media caught fire.
[The Second Ramanujan in Five Thousand Years of Mathematical History!]
That video clip in particular, with its provocative title, spread across the world with subtitles in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and more.
└Ramanujan was like a gift from God. Even if humanity never got to use him properly.
└Had no idea who that was so I looked him up. The man was incredible.
└You don't know Ramanujan? As an Indian I refuse to accept this! He is the saint of mathematics!
└If it weren't for us the world would still be solving equations with Roman numerals or Chinese characters. India is the birthplace and the holy land of math.
└Yeah, sure. So how many Fields Prizes do you guys have?
└Looked it up, two ㅋㅋㅋㅋ. And one of them wasn't even an Indian citizen. So basically one.
└So you're on the same level as Korea? ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└There's nothing to be done about India having so few winners of the Three Major Math Prizes. Most of our geniuses take jobs in Silicon Valley because they have families to feed.
└Maybe Team Apex's Srinivasa Krishnan will bring home another one?
└I'm Indian too and back home the press has slapped the name "next Ramanujan" on about a thousand kids. They were all hopeless, which honestly bothered me. At least people abroad found a real candidate. If you want to use that name, go solve a Millennium Prize Problem first, like Yu Seo-ha.
* * *
A temporary closure sign went up at the study café.
Trucks carrying specialists and equipment pulled up in front of the building.
Whirrrrr-
Special coating work, meant to minimize contact with the air and prevent discoloration from ultraviolet light. Behind them, low-reflection reinforced glass worth tens of millions of won waited on a crane.
"Thank you, seonsaengnim."
"It's nothing. Please keep looking after this place."
Woo-hyun had bought the café building.
It was a small building on the outskirts of Daejeon, so the cost wasn't much of a burden, but the landlord's greed had been the wild card.
When the man threatened that he wouldn't sell for anything less than ten times market value, Woo-hyun had to settle things through a lawyer.
"My client says he'll restore the walls to their original condition before he vacates."
The landlord's face went ashen. Seeing that, the lawyer slid a document across the table toward him.
"This is our final offer. It's still better than market value, so let's end it here."
In the end he stamped his registered seal with trembling hands.
The price was generous compared to the market rate, but Woo-hyun didn't begrudge a single won of it. Only one thought filled his head.
'No one can be allowed to own this privately.'
The work took three days to finish.
Once the last glass panel was fitted and the crew filed out of the café, the interior finally went quiet.
Step, step.
Woo-hyun walked slowly along the wall.
With the lighting glowing softly over everything, it felt like standing in a museum. He gazed into the wall. The writing beyond the glass looked neat, exactly as Seo-ha's handwriting always did, and yet at the same time it felt alive.
'What on earth did you see?'
Equations he still couldn't understand.
Scrape.
He quietly dragged a chair over and sat down.
"Thirteen, huh...."
The number of conditions that had to be cleared for Seo-ha's intended conclusion to hold.
A theorem resting on no fewer than thirteen assumptions. And each assumption carried enough weight to be called an open problem in its own right.
'What is he planning to do about this....'
A thought suddenly came to him.
Mathematicians were a breed that felt exhilaration solving problems no one else could. And all of this had already been laid open to the entire world.
So would they really sit still?
"I should make a few calls."
Woo-hyun muttered with a small laugh.
* * *
Academia was quieter than expected.
Just as The Planet had feared, skepticism dominated.
Mathematicians acknowledged everything Seo-ha had achieved up to now, but drew a firm line this time, calling it a hasty conclusion.
"There isn't even a formal paper, is there?"
"It was just a sketch on a somewhat grand scale. Haven't we all poured out ideas off the top of our heads at some point?"
Their private feelings, however, were another matter.
Photographs of the equations were already circulating through any number of channels, and someone's post organizing them became the single most-shared item in the mathematics community within days.
Naturally, the most cynical voices came from engineering and computer science.
[The biggest fiasco in mathematics this year]
[I don't get it. Why is everyone losing their minds? Even a brilliant mathematician can be wrong.]
The reaction didn't stop there.
A few days later, a prominent editor-in-chief in the field of computer science contributed a short column to a magazine.
[If it ain't broke, don't fix it.]
The column, which took as its title a maxim developers live by out in the field, was humorous, but its contents had an edge.
To them, this debate had sounded hollow from the very beginning.
The code they wrote every day moved civilization. A world built in Turing's language was running perfectly well at this very moment, and now they were being told it wasn't complete.
[It seems the mathematicians want to have their fun, but please don't drag those of us in the field into it.]
"Hmm."
Quirin Dusk, Abel Prize winner and professor of mathematics at Harvard.
He frowned at his monitor as though he didn't care for what he was seeing.
On his desk lay an unfamiliar book his teaching assistant had left behind.
「Seo-ha's 13-Step Hypothesis」
It was something that had started showing up all over campus at some point. It was ridiculous. What was this, the thirteen stairs down to hell?
The author's name was printed clearly in the title, but the thing had never once been formally published. A crank document. It had all started when someone turned the equations on the wall into a PDF and spread it around.
Then it got printed, then bound, and finally made into something that passed for a real book.
"What in the world is Dean Whitman doing?"
He could have contained this situation easily.
A single word urging caution about excessive fervor over an unverified hypothesis would have been enough. Seo-ha surely hadn't intended to present it seriously either.
But there had been no word from either of them.
Whitman smiled and dodged a direct answer every time he was asked, and Seo-ha had not issued a single official statement since that day.
Riffle.
He turned a page.
A provocative preface, written in large letters, caught his eye.
[Yu Seo-ha said that the Turing machine cannot fully contain this universe.]
"Aah!"
A preface far too much like superstition to be catching on at Harvard, the frontier of human intellect.
He clutched his head in frustration.
"This is bad."
A book that could only be described as crank literature was steadily gaining popularity.
He could guess the cause.
To young students of mathematics, Seo-ha was something beyond a phenomenon. From a young age he had solved problems established scholars couldn't, and then he'd gone and proved the Riemann Hypothesis, the holy grail of mathematics. Of course they idolized him.
"Even so, not like this. There's no helping it, then."
Mathematics must always stand on cold, clear logic. Not on superstitious faith like this.
Quirin resolved that he would take the lead himself and clean up this disorderly situation. He picked up his phone and left a message on his contact list.
* * *
The next morning, ten people gathered in his office.
Master's and doctoral students he had chosen personally, plus a postdoc. Among the finest talents in Harvard's mathematics department.
"We are going to find a counterexample."
Several copies of 'Seo-ha's 13-Step Hypothesis', gathered from students almost by confiscation, lay on the table.
He spoke with a solemn expression.
"Seo-ha is by no means a careless mathematician. I read the book myself yesterday, and every single assumption in it carries very complicated meaning."
Those gathered in the office nodded.
"The thirteen assumptions in the book are all independent. But at the same time they're sequential. Which means if even one of them collapses, it's finished right there. It was a sketch, not a proof, so it makes no sense for it to have no weak points.
What is certain is that even a genius makes mistakes sometimes. Especially when he's in a hurry. What we have to do is bring this abnormally cultish atmosphere to a mathematical end as quickly as possible."
Bang!
He struck the table hard with his palm.
"One counterexample is enough. Publish just that and the situation will die down on its own."
""Yes, sir!""
The students' faces brightened.
Finding a counterexample was far easier than proving something true. There was no need to construct an argument, only to find a single hole, and it was over.
This was an Abel Prize winner, a respected professor, personally assembling a team and stepping in. Producing a result here would be a career achievement worth boasting about all on its own.
Of course, the chance to land a blow on that insufferable MIT was another important reason.
Quirin opened the book.
「Step 1: In a continuous topological space, the density of branch points cannot be measured countably.」
"We'll pour everything we have into this one. As for time.... a week should be plenty."
Everyone nodded with grim determination.
* * *
Quirin's office.
For the first three days the students were in high spirits. It seemed that simply latching onto the phrase "countably measured" would make a counterexample pop out quickly, following the basic principles of measure theory.
But on the fourth day, Liam, the most capable postdoc, set down his chalk with a trembling hand.
"Professor, something's wrong. Every time I substitute in a counterexample, the density function Seo-ha defined for the branch points diverges, and it does it so cleverly."
Quirin got up from his seat and stood in front of Liam's blackboard.
Equations packed in from edge to edge.
The approach Liam had tried was clever. He had attempted to use measure theory's countable additivity to separate the set of branch points into finitely many pieces.
He picked up the chalk and pointed to one part of the equation.
"It diverges here?"
"Yes. No matter what I try, an interval where the measure isn't defined always appears at this exact point."
The students around them gathered one by one in front of Liam.
As though they had a great deal they wanted to say, they all began laying out the problems they'd been struggling with and comparing them.
"I don't understand it. Why is it this hard to find a counterexample?"
"The deeper I dig, the more solid the structure gets. I started thinking I must be doing something wrong."
Murmur, murmur.
Then one of the students quietly raised a hand and spoke.
"Could it be.... could it be that Seo-ha was right? Not just this one, but all thirteen steps. What happens then?"
Unfortunately, it was a question no one could answer.
*****
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