Translator: Dreamscribe
How has mathematics been passed down through the ages?
In the past, access to knowledge was itself a form of power. Books had to be copied by hand onto expensive parchment, and they were regarded as treasured assets of a city.
It was an era when a single book could cost as much as an entire house.
And so, inevitably, knowledge could only be transmitted through people. Holding their breath, disciples wrote down every word their master spoke.
In doing so, they came to resemble not only their master's knowledge but his attitude and way of thinking as well. This, too, remained as a scholarly tradition, passed down together with the rest.
'A pathetic excuse.'
Marcello, professor emeritus at Cambridge University, leaned back loosely in his chair and listened to what the ICM committee members were saying.
Having served on the problem committee for the IMO that Seo-ha once competed in, he was also an elder statesman of the mathematics world who had taken pleasure in watching Seo-ha grow.
'They're afraid.'
He read fear in the eyes of the committee members making their impassioned arguments.
The printing press had been invented; academic journals and the internet had come into being. And yet the mathematics world still held lineage to be sacred.
From Leibniz to Bernoulli. Through Euler and Lagrange, all the way to Gauss.
Gauss's student Riemann nurtured Felix Klein, and at last the lineage of modern analysis ran all the way down to David Hilbert.
In 1997, Minnesota State University set out to trace the "PhD advisor and student" relationships among mathematicians.
The number of people included in this survey, dubbed the so-called "Mathematics Genealogy Project", came to no fewer than three hundred thousand.
Every mathematician had been someone's student, and someone's teacher as well.
And so, these people feared Seo-ha.
Seo-ha, who held no doctorate, not even a bachelor's degree, and was no one's student.
He had come from outside the lineage. Nowhere in that vast family tree, where three hundred thousand mathematicians were densely interconnected, did Seo-ha's name appear.
'How foolish.'
Marcello looked up at the ceiling and let out a small snort.
Those people were surely thinking something like this.
'If he leaves an immortal achievement in the history of mathematics, then what is the meaning of lineage? Does it mean that the intangible wisdom and tradition we believed had passed from master to disciple were, in fact, things we could have done without?'
The bewilderment of seeing the order they had upheld negated by a single boy.
He looked around the conference room. Heated expressions, trembling voices.
'The road ahead won't be smooth for that boy.'
There was nothing more worth hearing.
Marcello slowly rose from his seat.
***
Pat, pat!
Su-jeong looked in the mirror and patted her own cheeks.
Skin pale to the point of whiteness, stubborn eyes, a well-shaped nose, a reasonably pretty face, she thought.
"Did you pack everything?"
"Yeah, there's not much to bring anyway."
Myung-hee, Su-jeong's mother, cracked the door open and checked her daughter's face.
When Su-jeong had first announced she was going to MIT, the couple had agonized over it. They couldn't send their still-young daughter off to America alone.
"I should be the one to go, right? I've got a research record, so MIT might even make a position for me. And if that doesn't work out, there's always Boston University."
Min-jun, her husband, said this with a grave look on his face.
A professor at Seoul National University, he was one of the country's foremost authorities on materials engineering. Myung-hee gazed at him through narrowed eyes.
"Boston's the biggest medical city in America, isn't it? Wouldn't it make more sense for me to go, since I'm a doctor?"
The fact that Harvard and MIT both sat within the city said a great deal.
In a mid-sized city of barely six hundred fifty thousand people, fewer than five million even when extended to the surrounding hundred-kilometer metropolitan area, the world's finest medical cluster was densely concentrated.
"I speak better English than you. All you know is medical vocabulary, right?"
"Excuse me? I'm a woman who's written several papers in English! And I've worked in the States as a visiting physician, too."
In the end, they decided that whoever got an offer first would be the one to go. And the winner was Myung-hee.
Right up until the day mother and daughter departed, Min-jun muttered to himself with a dazed expression.
"Me, a goose father..."
Su-jeong took his hand with pity in her eyes.
A respected professor, an authority on materials engineering, a man who didn't even know the exact number of times his papers had been cited, somewhere in the thousands. That very father stood in the airport lobby, gripping her hand tightly, his eyes reddening.
Though these days, every phone call was nothing but nagging.
"Dad's coming too?"
At Su-jeong's words, Myung-hee nodded.
She looked at her daughter with a proud expression. When Su-jeong had said she wanted to study mathematics, she had simply taken it in stride. It was a highly applicable field, she'd thought, so it would help no matter what her daughter ended up doing in the future.
But her daughter's dream was to be a full-time mathematician. Before she submitted her application to MIT, her husband had put on a deliberately serious face and tried to talk her out of it.
"Two years for a master's, at least five for a doctorate. Then a few more years drifting from one postdoc to the next. By then, how old will you be, Su-jeong? Are you telling me you don't mind a future like that?"
Su-jeong scrunched up her face with an "ugh" and answered.
"Nope. I'm going to win the Fields Prize, you know?"
"The mathematics world is a place where even Fields Prize winners have to compete for tenured positions. Because there are so few of them."
Mathematics, of all fields, had the most entrenched cartel. A vacancy only opened up once someone retired or died. And even then, without academic pedigree and connections, such a position was hard to lay claim to.
Even so, Su-jeong's resolve was firm.
"I'm going to solve a Millennium Prize Problem with Seo-ha, so it doesn't matter. Surely there'll be a spot for me by then."
Min-jun let out a sigh.
His daughter had talent. But the mathematics world was a place teeming with monsters far greater than her. A place where even they vanished without producing a single achievement in their entire lives. A Millennium Prize Problem, of all things.
'Yu Seo-ha.'
He was the problem.
He was grateful that the boy had cured the narcissism of a daughter who had only ever come first in everything, but was this the price for it?
The couple racked their brains over it, but they couldn't find an answer.
And now that very daughter had grown into this.
'I suppose we were the ones who believed in you the least.'
A full-fledged member of the most closely watched research lab in the world. Her husband's current messenger profile photo was of their daughter standing proudly at a press conference at New York City Hall, microphone in hand.
[Sujeong Lim, Team Apex, MIT]
"Hurry, get in."
Thunk.
Vrooom.
The car cruised smoothly down the road.
Myung-hee had arranged to travel to Germany together with Seo-ha's family. Getting out of the car, her daughter spotted Seo-eun and ran over. The two of them clasped hands and bounced up and down, looking thick as thieves.
Su-jeong whispered something into the child's ear and flashed a villainous grin. Watching her, Seo-eun burst into giggles.
"Um... hello."
"Hi?"
The boy who had been hovering off to the side, gauging the mood, edged over hesitantly and offered a greeting.
It was the first time she was meeting Seo-ha in person.
'He's pretty tall, isn't he? And not bad-looking either.'
With his small face and long limbs, he gave off the impression of a model.
"Let's go!"
Two mothers in the front seats, the kids in the back.
The car was soon filled with the children's chatter. Who would ever guess these were mathematicians invited to the ICM? They looked as bright and carefree as students heading off on a school field trip.
But that peace shattered to pieces the moment they got out of the car and stepped into the terminal.
"Good heavens, what is all that?"
Reporters were waiting in the airport lobby.
Several broadcast cameras stood lined up in a row, and beside them, Korean expatriates had come out holding all manner of picket signs.
[Pride of Korea, Yu Seo-ha!]
[Seo-ha, we're rooting for you! -Boston Korean Association]
"Surprised, Mom?"
Su-jeong came over with a playful expression.
"Of course I am. You'd think some celebrity had arrived. Are mathematicians always this popular?"
"No, it only happens very rarely."
Wiles, who solved Fermat's Last Theorem, and Perelman, who proved the Poincaré Conjecture: both were mathematicians who had basked in a dazzling spotlight.
Put the other way around, this sort of thing never happened unless one solved a Millennium-class problem.
But Seo-ha was the exception.
A boy in his teens was smashing through the unsolved problems of mathematics one by one. On top of that, having built the Oracle, he was already a familiar face through television and newspapers. Attending the ICM as the youngest-ever Fields Prize candidate, Seo-ha was more than enough to make the press salivate.
Click.
Click.
"Seo-ha! There's a rumor that your proof of the Riemann Hypothesis is in its final stages. Is that true?"
"We hear you'll be giving a plenary lecture at the ICM. Do you have something new to announce?"
"Just a word, please, on your chances of winning the Fields Prize!"
"What do you make of the criticism that Team Apex lacks racial diversity?"
"There's a rumor going around that you intend to become a naturalized American citizen. Is there any basis to that?"
Camera flashes kept going off one after another.
Su-jeong sidled over and took Seo-eun's hand. Seo-eun clasped her hand back. It was a small, warm hand.
"Is my big brother famous?"
"Yeah."
"What about you?"
"A little famous."
"Cecilia and Theo too?"
"That's right. Because we're the best lab there is. And you're the team's one and only special assistant."
"Wow!"
Seeing the admiration in Seo-eun's eyes, Su-jeong wore a satisfied look.
The team members arrived at the airport one by one. Su-jeong joined them, did a brief interview, and went through the boarding procedures.
"Oh! This is my first time flying business class."
Marveling at it, Sri leaned back in his seat and stretched out his legs.
MIT had given the team extraordinary support. Seat upgrades and a four-star hotel in downtown Hanover with breakfast included. For an ordinary conference trip, such perks would have been unthinkable.
Hmmmmm.
Through the night, the plane crossed the Atlantic.
In the seat beside him, Seo-eun was sleeping soundly. From behind came the sound of Sri and Theo snoring. But Seo-ha couldn't fall asleep.
'Don't you think it's time? Go on, let me out now.'
"Not yet."
'You already know the path to the Operator. With me alongside you, you could find it faster.'
"It's not perfect yet. I need more time."
Seo-ha took out his notebook and wrote down a formula. But soon he sighed and closed it. For a while now, he hadn't been able to concentrate well.
Perhaps it was because he had pushed his mind too hard for too long while carrying out his research.
Seo-ha resolved that during the ICM, while he was with his family, he must never show Ducky an opening.
Tap, tap-tap.
Watching the rain fall outside the window, Seo-ha thought of Riemann.
He had been frail and sickly.
Poverty and illness had followed him his whole life like a curse.
'If you had lived just a little longer, would the world have been different?'
The summer of 1866, by a lakeside near a small village in northern Italy.
Convalescing there, Riemann passed away at just thirty-nine years of age. Leaving behind his beloved wife Elise and a three-year-old daughter.
Even as he lay dying of tuberculosis, he never stopped his research. The enormous volume of documents he left behind. Tragically, it is said that after his death the landlord burned them all while cleaning the house.
'What were you working on, Riemann? Were you still clinging to that hypothesis you couldn't prove?'
Ever since he was little, Seo-ha had never once read his story without shedding tears.
Dew gathered in his eyes. And then it trickled down his cheek.
*****
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