Translator: Dreamscribe
When Seo-ha was called out by the Dean and left, silence settled over the lab.
"...."
"...."
"I never imagined we'd be the ones being chased."
Sri said, almost as if sighing.
Cambridge was the university that had produced the great Newton himself. For a professor at the institution revered as the holy ground of mathematics to make an official announcement meant the theory had to already be in its completion stage. Without question, dozens of scholars were probably gathered right now, throwing themselves into verification.
"At times like this, I start to wonder if even the math world has been swallowed up by capital. Modern problems are nearly impossible to research without a supercomputer.
We're not in a bad spot ourselves, but a Munich-Cambridge alliance...."
Cambridge and Oxford had been rivals for hundreds of years.
Cecilia frowned with a sulky expression.
"With flagship professors from both universities stepping out, it's definitely intimidating. How many resources do you think they've poured in?"
Even Su-jeong, who had little interest in academia, recognized those names.
Ben's hands were trembling.
"Munich University gets priority allocation of computing resources from the LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre). On top of that, Felix is the textbook power-seeking type of scientist. The fact that he joined hands with Professor Arthur from Cambridge probably means there were discussions at the national level. And Cambridge's Newton Institute alone has dozens of postdocs...."
A relentless onslaught from the British-German allied forces, but on this side, just six people. Not even enough to form a squad.
That was when Theo, who had been silent, opened his mouth.
"You're all missing the point."
Everyone's eyes turned to Theo.
"Without the paper Seo-ha tossed their way, those people couldn't even have started. You're really that scared of a bunch like that getting together to make noise?"
Even if hundreds or thousands gathered with torches in hand, it wouldn't make them the sun.
He had absolute conviction in Seo-ha.
"Well, that's true."
"I also think it would be hard for them to find anything Seo-ha hadn't already considered."
"Still, we can't let our guard down. Professor Arthur isn't a man to be taken lightly."
"B...but what is Seo-ha especially good at?"
At Sri's question, Theo tilted his head.
"Hm?"
"We all have our specialties, right? Su-jeong's strong in Number Theory, Theo in Analysis. But sometimes when I watch Seo-ha, it's like there's nothing he doesn't know. Even in engineering or physics."
"Ah, you meant that?"
Theo shook his head and laughed.
"The amount Seo-ha knows is beyond imagination. He'll plow through several major-journal-level papers in a single day. I asked him about it once out of curiosity, and apparently whenever he runs into a concept he doesn't know, he goes and studies each one in detail."
"S...so."
"The fact that he reads several at a time means nothing trips him up along the way. Math is heavily entangled with engineering and physics, so he must have inevitably gone through all that beforehand.
That vast pool of knowledge gets combined with Seo-ha's superhuman thinking. For him, the boundaries between disciplines probably don't even exist to begin with."
"He's like Newton."
Cecilia nodded.
Newton couldn't explain the physical phenomena he had discovered using the mathematics of his time. The tool he created to prove them was calculus.
For him, math and physics surely weren't separate languages.
"So can we say Seo-ha's specialty is the breadth of his knowledge pool?"
"No, that's just his baseline tendency. To put it in gaming terms, it's like a passive skill. Seo-ha is good at everything, but in two particular areas, he's so outstanding you can't find anyone to compare him to."
Snap!
"I think I know one. It's intuition, isn't it?"
Sri snapped his fingers and cut in.
"Every Indian reads a biography of Ramanujan as a child, and honestly, I used to think all the stories about Goddess Namagiri telling him the answers were made up after his death. A kind of national marketing campaign to deify him, you could say.
It doesn't make logical sense that he could know the answers to those complex infinite series without any proof process. But after working with Seo-ha, I started thinking it might actually be possible."
"Yeah, exactly. There have only been a handful of people in history with mathematical intuition on Seo-ha's level. Probably few enough to count on one hand."
"What's the other one?"
At Su-jeong's question, Theo's expression turned pleased.
"Geometry.
I guarantee, this one only needs one finger, not a whole hand. Seo-ha's geometric talent is so outstanding that the only person you could compare him to is Euclid."
The complexity of modern geometry was beyond what words could describe.
It had long since soared past the level of dealing with two-dimensional figures or three-dimensional solids. The terrifying thing about this field was that it completely ignored the visual limits of human beings. Once a shape reached even four dimensions, the human mind couldn't picture its form. Because geometry contained many manifolds for which visualization was physically impossible, this was unavoidable.
That was why Algebraic Geometry had emerged: even mathematicians had ended up taking refuge in abstract formulas, going 'since the equation looks like this, the shape probably looks something like this.'
"Seo-ha can rotate high-dimensional structures freely, like an apple in his palm. And while he's doing it, he wears this expression like, 'Why can't you guys see this?'"
"Ah!"
Su-jeong let out a sound as if something had come back to her.
"He's been like that since we were kids. No matter how hard the geometry problem was, he'd know the answer the moment he saw it. Now it all makes sense."
"Could that Seo-ha really have missed a possibility Professor Arthur saw? I'm extremely skeptical. That 'innovative breakthrough' they claim to have found might just be logic Seo-ha already concluded was a dead end and tossed in the trash."
Ben put on a mischievous expression.
"Then they're celebrating while cradling a bomb. Having blown things up to this scale, getting publicly humiliated won't be where it ends."
"Let's wait and see who wins. Our research seems to be finally finding its direction too."
The geometric figure that had begun with Cecilia and been completed by Seo-ha. This was a far vaster and more complex subject than they had imagined.
And Apex Lab was now pouring all its resources into that problem.
'If he'd decided it was meaningless, he would have stopped already.'
Theo sensed intuitively that Seo-ha had grasped some thread of a solution here.
* * *
The Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge University, England.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
Close to a hundred researchers sat glued to their monitors, hammering away at their keyboards without rest.
On the large screen mounted on the wall, data being transmitted from the LRZ Centre in Bavaria, Germany was pouring down like a waterfall.
"We've now confirmed the Zeta Function up to 10^16. Computational error is within 20 decimal places, and the correlation coefficient with the operator is holding steady at 0.9998."
At the researcher's report, Professor Felix nodded with a look of satisfaction. Tailored suit, expensive watch: he looked more like the CEO of a massive corporation than a scholar.
"Beyond what I imagined. I didn't expect it to deliver this much."
A white-haired old gentleman, Professor Arthur Pendleton, adjusted his reading glasses and gazed at the screen. On the desk beside him lay Seo-ha's paper, worn ragged from being read so many times.
He picked up the paper and spoke.
"How was this even possible? The more I think about it, the more astonishing it is. Without already knowing the answer, he couldn't possibly have captured the chaotic energy levels of a quantum system in such a perfect language."
At Arthur's almost reverent voice, Felix snorted.
"And what good does that do? He's too young, and too inexperienced. Just publishing a discovery this valuable out in the open... isn't that exactly the sort of thing only a greenhorn would do?
In modern science, no matter how difficult the problem, as long as there's even the slightest crack, you can force your way through to an answer. Even with the Riemann Hypothesis."
It was a choice he himself would never have made.
Now the world would remember his name as the one who solved the Riemann Hypothesis.
'Do you know? Throughout the history of science, the one who provides the idea has always been the supporting role.'
A smile spread across Felix's lips.
Alfred Russel Wallace.
He was the founder of biogeography, which formed the theoretical foundation of the theory of natural selection. But after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his name vanished from the public's memory as if by magic.
'Who gets the world's recognition first.'
In the end, that was all there was to it.
This was the reason he had pushed ahead with the announcement despite Professor Arthur's attempts to dissuade him.
"Aren't we rushing this? 10^16. Even ten quadrillion is just an instant from the perspective of infinity. Of course, I too am confident this hypothesis is correct. But we need to go through more rigorous mathematical verification...."
"Professor! This is not a cowardly act. Shouldn't we finally fulfill Professor Hardy's lifelong wish?"
Munich's Felix research team had applied the Renormalization Group (RG) theory used in high-energy physics to the Zeta Function.
Through overwhelming computation, they had confirmed that the energy of zeros attempting to deviate from the critical line diverges to infinity. Now all that remained was to reverse-engineer the mathematical operator that fit it....
A flicker of conflict appeared on Professor Arthur's face.
It was sufficiently persuasive both mathematically and physically. Criticism of post hoc construction would be unavoidable, but this also fell well within the range of what was tolerated in the scientific community.
'Not announcing this would be a dereliction of duty.'
He was swayed.
It wasn't for any other reason. The fact that their research was the closest of any theory published to date to proving the Riemann Hypothesis was simply undeniable.
He nodded with a firm expression.
"Understood."
* * *
Pwah!
Seo-ha rinsed his face roughly, then looked into the mirror.
Two months had passed since the announcement from Cambridge and Munich, and they were churning out articles through the media every single day.
[Unprecedented Cooperation Between British and German Academia: Is the Riemann Hypothesis Finally Being Solved?]
[Professor Felix: "It Will Be the Greatest Historical Turning Point Since the Theory of Relativity."]
[Academia in an Uproar. Has the Riemann Hypothesis Already Been Solved? Internal Verification Underway, Official Announcement Just a Matter of Time]
But the team was not shaken.
Seo-ha was grateful that he was blessed with the people around him.
"The path to a proof is still uncertain. But there's one fact I've come to be certain of through all our research so far."
At Seo-ha's words, everyone took on a tense expression.
'Already?'
'Seo-ha doesn't usually use the word "certain."'
'Has he finally got it?'
"What is it?"
Theo asked on behalf of everyone.
"If the Riemann Hypothesis is true, there must be a geometric reason for it."
Seo-ha drove the point home, ending the vague speculation. Everyone nodded with resolute faces.
From that day on, the team's direction was set.
Beep-
When he opened the door and stepped in, the lab was buzzing with heat.
The team members were huddled in front of the blackboard, engaged in heated discussion. Dozens of sheets of paper were rolling around on the floor like late-autumn leaves.
"Oh, Seo-ha, you're back?"
Theo grinned and waved his hand.
"What did they say? Pushing you to announce early again?"
"Something like that. The other side is releasing a paper soon, so I guess they're getting antsy."
The team was being pressured through various channels.
It wasn't that they had no theories worth announcing. They had built up meaningful data through several different approaches over the past while. But none of those was the proof Seo-ha and the team wanted.
Seo-ha gave a light shrug and walked toward the blackboard. On it, the projection diagrams of the manifold the team had completed over a long stretch of time were tangled together like an intricate pattern.
The past two months.
APEX had gathered day and night to keep the research going. And Seo-ha had been organizing the chaos of mixed perspectives.
As they corrected the errors one by one, they came to realize that the geometric pattern that had seemed so confusing actually held profound meaning.
'Hm. I like it.'
Theo wore a satisfied expression.
The team trusted its leader and was moving in one direction. They had only just begun to grasp a thread of the 'geometric reason' Seo-ha had spoken of.
'Not something we can announce right away, though.'
But he wasn't worried.
'History really does repeat itself.'
In November of 1915, too, the one who had submitted the paper first had been Hilbert.
*****
For 30 or more extra chapters, you can check out my Patreon here --> patreon.com/dreamscribe
If you enjoy this novel, please review and rate it at Novelupdates. Thanks! 😊
To receive the latest update notifications or report mistakes, join our Discord server linked below.