Translator: Dreamscribe
Whitman stood before the blackboard, a piece of chalk gripped in his hand.
The hard texture against his fingertips felt strangely unfamiliar and yet welcome all at once. For the past several years, he had lived a life more accustomed to administration than to research. The title of dean had granted him authority, but it had stripped away his identity as a mathematician.
'Can I really do this?'
'Won't I just embarrass myself?'
The stray thoughts refused to leave his mind.
After receiving the Abel Prize, Whitman had, at some point, grown complacent.
Amid the praise of his colleagues and the respectful gazes of his students, he had slowly become a coward.
He was afraid of being wrong.
An academic error meant the collapse of one's authority. If he stepped back now, he could at least be remembered as an elegant old scholar.
In that instant, many faces flashed through his mind.
A college classmate who had clung to unsolved problems his entire life and ended his days in a mental hospital, and the countless students who, unable to endure the stress of the proof process, had abandoned academia and headed for Wall Street.
'Do I even have the right to blame them?'
Whitman gave a bitter smile.
Seo-ha had thrown himself at an unsolved problem at the mere age of seven. And all because he simply didn't like the answer!
When even a child found the courage, for an old soldier who had won the Abel Prize to turn his head away just to protect his reputation was a humiliation too great to bear.
Suddenly, anger at himself surged up within him.
"I'm his teacher! Even if I can't set an example for him!"
Clack!
An equation was written on the blackboard.
Once he began, the decades of mastery that had been lying dormant came pouring out like a waterfall. There was no more hesitation. Whitman had returned to the young mathematician of half a century ago who had stayed up all night, captivated by the beauty of mathematics.
* * *
The dean's office of the MIT Physics Department.
Leonard was not pleased with the way things had been going lately.
"Damn it!"
He irritably shoved aside the copy of Felix's paper sitting on his desk.
For the past several years, the MIT Physics Department had been enjoying its golden age. After Seo-ha proved the relationship between Quantum Chaos and the distribution of zeros of the Riemann Zeta Function, a flood of derivative papers had come pouring out.
Centered on the postdocs who had witnessed the proof firsthand, new physical interpretations were added. The spectrum of chaotic systems, Quantum Ergodicity, even the information theory of black holes. Once the high-energy distributions of arcane quantum mechanics could be explained by the order of the Riemann zeros, the MIT Physics Department had reaped the rewards with its whole body, drawing the attention of academia and the press day after day.
But ever since Felix and Arthur's announcement, the mood had shifted in a strange direction.
"Has the Riemann Hypothesis really been solved? And on a physics basis, no less?"
Leonard put on his glasses and picked the paper back up to examine it. Felix had clothed Seo-ha's theory in overwhelming data, constructing a framework that would derive a mathematical operator.
"Hmm."
At a glance, it appeared to inherit and develop Seo-ha's theory. The public and the press, already dazzled by the flashy outer trappings, were exalting him as though he were humanity's savior.
But the intuition he had honed over a lifetime devoted to physics research told him that something here was wrong. In the end, Leonard decided to seek advice from someone who would know.
Knock knock!
When Leonard opened the door to the Mathematics Department dean's office and stepped inside, his eyes went wide.
"Wait, what on earth are you doing?"
Whitman was not in the neat attire he usually wore.
His hair was sticking out in every direction, and he had no idea where his jacket had gone; despite the cold weather, he was in nothing but a shirt. He smiled with an awkward expression. His hand was caked with white chalk dust.
"What brings you all the way here?"
Instead of answering, Leonard stared blankly at his hand.
"You can't have been giving a lecture, so why does your hand look like that?"
"Ahem! It's a long story. Ah! Now that you mention it, there's something I'd been wanting to ask you. Would you like to come inside?"
When he opened the door beside the office, it led to a seminar room.
The large blackboards that filled the room were packed with equations, not a single gap left empty.
"D-did you do all of this by yourself?"
Leonard stepped up to the blackboard and read through the expressions.
Whitman felt oddly embarrassed and wiped the sweat away with his shirtsleeve. Chalk dust smeared white across his face.
Seeing this, Leonard chuckled.
"Really now, Dean!"
This man, an Abel Prize laureate and the top figure of the MIT Mathematics Department, was covered in chalk dust like a freshly enrolled graduate student.
Whitman looked at the paper in Leonard's hand and said,
"That paper has been nagging at me. Seo-ha and Elijah felt the same way."
Leonard's eyes flew open.
"Ah! I knew it!"
It hadn't been a delusion.
He had been secretly doubting himself, wondering whether he was just blinded by jealousy and trying to tear down a fellow scholar's brilliant achievement.
But if Whitman, a giant of the mathematical world, and the greatest geniuses of the present age had felt the same sense of wrongness, then that was another matter entirely.
"I had parts that struck me as strange too."
A discussion began on the spot.
As it happened, neither man had anything particularly pressing to do. It was a courtesy the school had extended to the elderly professors approaching retirement.
That paper was a theory that had originally begun in physics. Leonard's joining was like gaining an entire army of reinforcements for Whitman. As the parts where Leonard had felt something off passed through Whitman's mathematical interpretation, the scope of where they needed to look began to narrow.
One day, two days. And before long, a month had passed.
The two old professors keenly felt the fact that they were no longer young.
Whenever the work hit a wall or their stamina ran low, they would go outside for a walk. Together, they had spent half a century at MIT. The two of them often sank into reflection and reminisced about the past.
"Let's sit here for a bit."
It was early winter, but the sunlight was pleasant.
His gaze was warm as he looked at the bench. It was the spot where Whitman's own teacher had often sat lost in thought.
"Times have changed a great deal."
Leonard looked around and spoke as though lamenting.
"No need to say it. There's no holding back the passing years."
"But we're among the lucky ones. We left a mark, however small, in the textbooks the students will learn from."
"Isn't that the very essence of scholarship? We, too, merely took one more step along a path that someone else had paved, and now our final duty is to bow down so the next generation can step over our backs and pass on by."
Whitman leaned his body against the back of the bench and gazed into the empty air. The cold winter air entered deep into his lungs.
"Come to think of it.... now I finally understand."
He poked at the fallen leaves piled on the ground with the tip of his cane.
"Understand what?"
"When I first saw their paper, it left me uneasy. A strange thing. The proof of the Riemann Hypothesis should have been one of the long-cherished dreams of the mathematical world.... It was something I ought to have been delighted about, but I felt nothing of the sort."
"Hmm. I think I felt the same way."
"The answer was simple. I think what I felt was a kind of insult."
"An insult?"
"There's a fitting way to solve a millennium-level problem. You could call it a matter of dignity. Andrew Wiles united algebra and geometry, which had been split apart for centuries, into one, and completed Fermat's Last Theorem. And what about the Poincaré Conjecture? Perelman succeeded in defining the shape of the universe by converting a problem of topology into a thermodynamic flow. We mathematicians felt a thrill watching them.
It was like finding, with human hands, a puzzle piece that God had hidden away and fitting it back into its proper place. Inheriting the legacy built up over centuries, developing it, and stepping forward in the process. But them...."
"They won't leave behind any legacy at all. They've done nothing more than show off the performance of their hardware."
"Even if it were true, I cannot accept it. The Riemann Hypothesis was a problem that should never have been solved this way!"
There was no beauty, no awe.
A proof that beat every visible possibility into submission with sheer overwhelming computational power.
"That isn't inheritance, it's theft. Violence wielded with no aesthetic whatsoever, solely to claim the spoils called a result!"
It was a low voice, but the resolute anger radiating from his whole body made Leonard feel a solemn reverence.
"Hahaha! Now I understand why you're so fond of Seo-ha, Dean."
At the thought of Seo-ha, Whitman's face brightened.
"Why do you think that is?"
"Well, it's because Seo-ha is the rightful heir."
Whitman nodded with a firm expression.
"From Pythagoras of antiquity to Wiles and Elijah Cronen of the modern day. It wouldn't be wrong to say that mathematics is the sum total of all the intellect humanity has accumulated over time. Seo-ha is a child who has inherited every last bit of that legacy of thousands of years, without a single piece missing."
His eyes were full of pride and affection for Seo-ha.
"Seo-ha's mathematics is full of affection and reverence for the masters of the ages. And yet within it he finds and walks his own path, so I dare say that, more than anyone in the past, he'll leave behind an even richer legacy for those who come after."
And they would pass along the path Seo-ha had paved and head toward the unknown lands humanity had yet to set foot on. This was the rightful form of the mathematics he had devoted his entire life to.
"He truly deserves to be called the favored darling of modern mathematics. [TL: 총아 (寵兒) literally means a beloved or favored child, here used to mean the prodigy/golden child of the field.]"
Silence flowed between them.
From far off came the lively laughter of students crossing the campus.
"So our responsibility is grave, isn't it? We're scholars who at least received that legacy, so we ought to clear away the filth piled up on the path our students must walk."
"Hmm.... but it won't be an easy task."
"...Their defensive logic is sturdier than I expected. Well, anyone bold enough to threaten the entire world wouldn't be so flimsy. Still, we have a compass, so an answer will turn up eventually...."
After agonizing over it for a while, Leonard suddenly burst out laughing as though something had occurred to him.
"What in the world are we even doing right now?"
"Hm? What do you mean?"
"I mean, we're supposedly the deans of the two most distinguished departments at MIT, so why are the two of us racking our brains in such a sorry state? Just counting the master's students, doctoral candidates, and postdocs under us, there are hundreds of them. We've got a whole horde of the brightest minds in the world at our command...."
Whitman's eyes flew open.
Seized by the desire to settle this quietly, he had forgotten the most powerful weapon he possessed.
That weapon was power!
"That's right!"
Whitman and Leonard, with grim, determined expressions, returned to their respective departments.
An hour later, the same notice went up on the bulletin boards of both departments.
[Recruitment Notice for an Internal Riemann Hypothesis Verification Task Force]
The notice opened in a very courteous tone.
It had a rather grandiose preamble about the calling and duty of the age, and a soft closing line expressing hope for voluntary participation.
But the details written below made it clear that this was by no means a matter that sought one's choice.
[Participation in this project will be recognized as course credit and research achievement. However, in the event of non-participation without a special reason, an in-depth interview with the dean will be scheduled during the next round of lab assignments and fellowship reviews.]
Among the master's and doctoral students and the postdocs who received the news, groans broke out.
"How is this voluntary participation!"
"Just because that side has a math-physics joint army, do we have to do this too?"
A few days later, hundreds of elites assembled in the grand auditorium of Building 7.
Whitman and Leonard stood on the platform, gazing down at them with satisfied expressions.
In later years, the people who had taken part in this project never hesitated to use the phrase "Total Mobilization" when they recalled the event of that day.
*****
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