Translator: Dreamscribe
Marcello glanced to the side.
Hans, the chairman, was clapping with a satisfied look on his face. Feeling the gaze on him, he turned with a sullen expression and asked.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I distinctly recall you objecting that he was far too young."
Seo-ha had stepped up to the podium and was giving his acceptance speech.
"...People often call mathematics a lonely discipline, but I have never once been alone. Shin Woo-hyun seonsaengnim, who helped me so much from a young age; MIT, which gave me unstinting support; my teammates, who believed in me; and my family, who are my pillar of strength. Above all, I want to express my gratitude to the heroes of the past and present who live and breathe within my mathematics."
Clap clap clap!
Seo-ha bowed deeply and stepped down from the stage.
Watching him, Hans spoke.
"While conducting the review, the committee members and I went back over the paper again."
His eyes fixed on Seo-ha's retreating figure, he continued.
"It was truly remarkable. Almost every element of mathematics is contained within Seo-ha's theory."
"He does have talent in many areas."
Hans shook his head.
"It's not merely a matter of that. The classical insights of the old masters, of course, but even the latest theories of the professors sitting in this very room, all of it was woven in with extraordinary precision. Even I might not have noticed if I hadn't looked closely."
"Ohoo."
Marcello narrowed his eyes as if intrigued. Hans let out a light sigh and added.
"A paper I wrote ten years ago was in there too. He'd made such excellent use of the theory that he grasped the heart of it like a researcher who'd spent decades on that field alone. Perhaps our mathematical community has been a little narrow-minded."
"Hahaha! A little? In the twenty-first century, we still cling to the apprenticeship system."
"The tradition of passing down knowledge from master to disciple will still be necessary going forward. But Seo-ha was a figure for whom lineage need not be questioned. If I had to put it, he might be called 'everyone's disciple'.
He took the entire heritage of mathematics that humanity has built up as his master."
Setting aside the factor of age, there was no candidate who surpassed Seo-ha.
The degrees varied, but the committee members each found their own traces in Seo-ha's paper. The genius they had thought dropped out of the sky was in fact a miracle that all of them had shaped, little by little.
Clap clap clap!
The applause showed no sign of stopping. All the way down from the stage and back to his seat, the mathematicians in the audience gave him a standing ovation filled with reverence.
'They must have been astonished.'
Hans looked around at the committee members.
Once their theories passed through Seo-ha's hands, they took on uses they had never anticipated. Once they realized this, none of them could readily cast an opposing vote.
The result was unanimous.
But at the same time, they felt a touch of bitterness. Though the theories were their own creations, they had failed to see what Seo-ha had seen.
* * *
[Plenary Lecture : Seoha Yu]
After a short intermission came the Plenary Lecture, and the boy who had just hung the Fields Prize around his neck walked back up to the podium.
The audience watched Seo-ha with eyes full of anticipation.
Seo-ha let out a small sigh.
'Of all days, today.'
Formulas roiled endlessly through his mind.
Years of accumulated knowledge from studying the Riemann Hypothesis was expanding. Ducky was greedily absorbing it, probing the possibility of solving the hypothesis.
'I'll think about it later.'
Seo-ha tried to push the noise in his head off to one side for the moment. But regardless of his will, it kept writhing.
He carefully tried to soothe Ducky.
'There'll be a chance soon. I'll let you run wild all you want then.'
But Ducky's thirst, held back for so long, was not satisfied by that much. It was as though something enormous beneath the surface of the water was slowly rising up.
The waves rippled. It seemed certain they would soon overflow.
'What am I supposed to do?'
The cameras were rolling. The world's greatest mathematicians were holding their breath. Above all, his family was watching. Showing himself going out of control in a situation like this was not what he wanted.
Seo-ha didn't know it, but news of his Fields Prize win was rocking all of Korea as breaking news.
[Yu Seo-ha, First Korean to Win the Fields Prize! Seizes Mathematics' Nobel!]
[18 Years Old, Shatters Youngest-Ever Record by 9 Years.]
[Proud Son of Korea Rewrites World Mathematical History.]
11 a.m. German time.
In Korea, it was just dinnertime.
Hands ladling stew across the dinner table all stopped at once. At the announcer's urgent voice coming from the living room TV, the family members in their rooms put down what they were doing and gathered in front of the screen.
"This is the live scene at the Hanover Dome right now! Just moments ago, the news is that Yu Seo-ha has won the Fields Prize. Let me say it once more. You are watching the very moment that the record of humanity's mathematical history is being rewritten."
Office workers heading home on the subway and buses pulled out their smartphones all at once, as if by prior agreement. In the live-stream window of the portal sites, hundreds of comments poured in every second.
In the restaurants grilling pork belly, in the cafés where people were chatting, gasps and applause broke out.
"Whoa! Insane, right?"
"He actually gets this? Isn't he not even old enough for college yet?"
"What is it? Is that thing really such a big deal?"
Seo-ha's win lit a burning fire in the hearts of Koreans, who had wryly called themselves a barren wasteland for the basic sciences.
The ICM has no separate broadcasting rights. Rather, since it carries the purpose of sharing humanity's intellectual assets, it is a very open organization when it comes to broadcasting and dissemination.
"Everyone! Can you see this? This is a live broadcast right now. I came all the way to Germany to bring it to you. If you subscribe and turn on notifications, I, a master's in mathematics, will do my very best to commentate for you!"
The math YouTubers had hit a rare jackpot.
They screamed with joy at viewer counts dozens of times higher than usual. The broadcasting stations, too, scrambled to cancel their regular programming and switched their screens to the live broadcast from Hanover.
"Now, the Plenary Lecture is about to begin."
In the heavy silence, Seo-ha raised his head.
Millions of eyes turned toward the boy standing at the lectern. But Ducky had now crossed its critical threshold and was trying to encroach on Seo-ha's consciousness.
With the Four Color Theorem, he had opened his eyes to find that three days had passed. This time, he couldn't even imagine how long it would be. Once he let his mind go, there would be no turning back.
'Accept it. Because that's who you are. Let's go into the formulas together. And no matter how many days it takes, we'll solve it all the way through.'
Ducky whispered as if mocking him.
The brimming water spilled over. And in the instant it became an undeniable tidal wave about to crash down over Seo-ha:
'Hm?'
He saw Gyeo-ul.
She was pointing at her own ear with her hand. Seo-ha suddenly remembered the item Gyeo-ul had pressed into his hand the day before.
Rustle.
He took the earphones out of his pocket.
Only then did Gyeo-ul show a satisfied expression.
'I had a feeling something was off.'
For a while now, Seo-ha's condition had not been good.
By now Gyeo-ul knew too. What that state of Seo-ha's meant. That dangerous sprint, hidden behind the blessing of genius, that wore him down from the inside.
She was busy with preparations for her Concours, but Gyeo-ul couldn't turn a blind eye to Seo-ha like this.
Click.
She switched on the transmitter inside her bag.
Heave-ho!
Then she pulled out the large keyboard she'd set on the floor and lifted it onto the desk. It was the digital piano she used when practicing alone in her dormitory room. Thinking something like this might happen, she had deliberately chosen a seat in the corner.
Seo-ha put the earphones into his ears.
In an instant, the murmuring of the Hanover Dome was cut off completely. Through that silence came the soft sound of Gyeo-ul's piano.
Thump, thump.
[Liszt, Liebestraum No. 3]
It was different from the score's tempo. Gyeo-ul began to play the piece at a pace just slightly slower than Seo-ha's heartbeat.
The people around her stared at Gyeo-ul with strange looks.
"What is that student doing right now?"
A professor nearby asked his companions with a flabbergasted expression.
Tick, ti-tick- ti-ti-di-tick.
"She's playing the piano."
"I can see that much myself."
A performance only two people in the entire world could hear.
Gyeo-ul closed her eyes and tried to feel Seo-ha's heartbeat. He was far away, but that was all right. It would match her own beat soon enough anyway.
"Could it be some kind of avant-garde art? It seems we're falling behind the times."
For a sensitive young girl, it could have been an embarrassing thing to do. All the more so because she was a performer whose name was known to the public.
But Gyeo-ul's every nerve was focused on Seo-ha alone. Because she knew that her playing was the only means of holding together Seo-ha's crumbling mind.
'It's all right. I'm right here.'
An arpeggio of beautiful melody.
It caressed Seo-ha's nerves like soft silk.
Tick-ti-ti-tick, ti-tick-
Gyeo-ul kept playing with her eyes closed.
What she had to feel at her fingertips was not the keys, but the breath of a single person.
Seo-ha listened to the piece in a daze.
Thump.
Thump.
The waves of formulas that had churned through his mind subsided.
Ducky hesitated.
Seo-ha's neurons, which had been excited to the point of bursting, began to find a steady rhythm along the bars of the music. And before long they grew calm, like a sea after a storm has passed.
'There we go.'
The ensemble was finally achieved. The breathing of the two of them was completely synchronized into one.
Seo-ha opened his eyes and slowly parted his lips.
"Thank you for waiting."
No one knew what had happened.
The audience simply assumed that Seo-ha had taken a slightly long moment to collect his breath because of nerves.
The lights dimmed and the projector switched on.
"Smale's Problem asked whether, even within this complex motion, an average exists somewhere."
At the gesture of Seo-ha's hand, the curve on the screen shifted.
"What we call a plane..."
His lecture flowed naturally into the Minimum Energy Theory.
Although it was not the proof everyone had been hoping for, the audience listened to Seo-ha's words with curious eyes and ears pricked up.
What was so special about this boy's thinking?
How had Seo-ha come to conceive of such a theory?
He was, so to speak, a being shrouded in mystery, and there was no shortage of things people wanted to know.
"The trigger was simple. While passing through a hallway, I happened to see a painting."
A trivial event from everyday life led to a mathematical inevitability. And in the end it led to a discovery vast enough to rewrite the history of mathematics.
Tens of thousands of scholars gathered at the Hanover Dome.
They were genuinely impressed. Because they were brilliant minds, they could faintly read the superhuman mathematical intuition that Seo-ha unconsciously let show.
And at last, the finale.
Clap clap clap!
When Seo-ha bowed, applause poured in from every direction.
As he came down from the podium, his waiting family came into view. Mi-young was dabbing at her tears with a handkerchief. Seo-eun looked thoroughly excited, as if something delighted her to no end.
"Thank you. It's all thanks to you, seonsaengnim. If I hadn't met you back then..."
Mi-young bowed her head over and over as she looked at Woo-hyun. Woo-hyun waved his hands and turned the credit back to her.
Click!
Click!
Camera shutters poured down from every direction.
After hugging his mother, Seo-ha took the medal from around his neck.
"Seo-eun, you waited a long time, didn't you?"
"Yeah!"
He bent his knees and carefully hung the medal around her neck. Archimedes' face glittered at Seo-eun's throat.
Her face was full of excitement.
"Oppa, thank you! I'll treasure it for the rest of my life!"
Seo-eun smiled brightly, baring her teeth.
Click!
Seo-ha let out a sigh of relief.
How fortunate that he had been able to protect his family's smiles. He looked at Gyeo-ul. Thanks to her, he had avoided the catastrophe of his strange behavior being broadcast live.
The image of Seo-eun, the gold medal around her neck, flashing a V sign and laughing happily.
Perhaps thinking it made a good picture, many news outlets ran this photograph.
[My oppa gave it to me.]
[The most special birthday present in the world]
The ICM continued for a week after that.
Unable to be away for long because of Seo-eun's school schedule, Mi-young left for the United States a few days later, putting her reluctance behind her.
"Take care of your health, all right?"
"Don't worry. Seonsaengnim is here with me, after all."
Seo-ha kept waving with a smiling face until the two of them were out of sight.
The expression on Seo-ha's face as he turned around was cold.
'Just how long does he intend to keep me waiting?'
He had been thinking it was about time anyway. Seo-ha nodded.
"Let's settle this here."
It just so happened to be a convenient moment, with his family safely away.
Seo-ha had no intention of letting this opportunity slip by.
*****
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