Whitman had recently found a new pleasure in life.
He had thought he was already passing through the winter of his life.
A life marked by lectures and research—years without regret.
But at some point, those things had become familiar. After winning the Abel Prize, he felt even the goals of his life growing hazy.
Yet over the past year, an astonishing change had come to him.
That change had approached silently and breathed new vitality into his life.
“Is it time?”
He glanced at his wristwatch and straightened his back.
Whitman had been taking walks often these days.
His doctor had recommended exercise, and given his age, he also thought he ought to take care of his health.
But that was only half the reason. The other half lay elsewhere.
Swoosh—
He reached out and picked up the fedora hanging on the rack.
He lightly dusted it off and put it on with a practiced motion. It was an old habit of his. Others might call it old-fashioned, but to him, it was an act with precious meaning.
Rustle.
He stroked the fedora with his fingertips. The sound stirred nostalgia within Whitman.
‘Master.’
He recalled the past from decades ago.
In his youth,
when he had yet to achieve anything in mathematics, there had been someone who guided him.
That man had always worn the same style of fedora.
A medium-height crown, a brim slightly bent forward—it was the kind of hat commonly worn by middle-class men in the period just after World War II.
His teacher would wear that hat and watch his students from the back of the lecture hall.
Whether winter or summer, even on days when a snowstorm swallowed Killian Court in white, he always stood in the same place.
One day, Whitman had asked him.
“Why do you always stand here?”
His teacher had smiled and answered.
“It is my own pleasure.
There is no joy in the world as intense as watching the moment someone realizes something new.”
Whitman had not been able to understand his words back then.
Step, step.
As he walked through the campus, he turned.
As he neared Seoha’s laboratory, Whitman’s steps slowed.
When he stopped in front of the glass window, the scene inside the lab came clearly into view.
Team Apex had been blocked by an invisible wall for weeks now.
Their simulation collapsed without fail at a certain point.
The models proposed by various papers all failed to explain this phenomenon.
“Ah! Not again.”
Sri clutched his head.
Once they passed the critical point, the numbers diverged again and again (divergence * a phenomenon in which values leave a certain range and grow infinitely or run out of control), and functions that should have converged would fluctuate and create strange patterns with the insertion of even the tiniest variable.
For weeks, Team Apex had been pouring all their capabilities into solving this problem.
Seoha had filled the blackboard with equations and was continuing his explanation to Theo and Sri.
He rolled a piece of chalk between his fingers, then drew a large curve in the lower right corner of the blackboard.
“With an energy function, the points where the slope becomes zero aren’t the only things that matter.”
Seoha tapped the chalk on both sides of the curve.
“What we need to pay attention to isn’t the moment the energy stops, but how the world after it stops moves.”
Theo raised his hand.
“Then are you saying the flow field around the function is more important than the function heading toward the minimum point? For instance, that strange oscillation we saw...
If that wasn’t simple noise, but something caused by an unstable fixed point?”
Seoha’s eyes gleamed.
“Exactly! That’s it!”
He pointed again to the middle of the curve.
“The point here where the slope becomes zero may look like an extremum in the traditional sense, but its properties change completely depending on the curvature of the surface.”
Sri suddenly sprang up from his seat as if he had realized something.
“Then the pattern we were agonizing over wasn’t the function model breaking down? If we were passing right beside an unstable fixed point...”
Seoha nodded in satisfaction.
“That’s the key.”
He quickly drew arrows along the slope lines of the curve he had drawn on the blackboard.
Like currents of water, they flowed along the side of the curved surface before branching at a certain point and leaping off in another direction.
“Look here. This is a fixed point, but the curvature is extremely shallow. So the system pretends to stay here for a moment, and then...”
Seoha struck one side of the blackboard with the chalk.
“It falls away to one side like this.”
Theo spoke in an excited voice.
“Damn it! It wasn’t noise. I can’t believe we only realized that now. That means if we analyze this properly, we can move on to the next stage!”
Sri hurriedly stood up and pulled out a sheet of paper he had buried in a drawer.
“Look at this graph. The same signal is here too.
Until now, we’ve analyzed the model based on fixed values, but from now on, flow and geometry will be important.”
The three looked at one another.
Their eyes shimmered with heat.
Seoha said with a bright smile.
“From now on, we have to combine flow, stability, curvature, bifurcation—all of it—and create a new framework.
We’re no longer at the stage of finding an existing solution. We’ve entered the stage of uncovering the way a solution is born.”
All their hardship had not been in vain.
At last, they had taken one step up the path to the summit.
“Shiiit—we actually did it.”
Perhaps overwhelmed by emotion, Theo let out a rough exclamation. Sri, too, covered his eyes with his hand, unable to contain himself.
“It’s small, but it’s definite progress.”
His voice was trembling.
Seoha quietly approached and placed his hands on their shoulders.
“Thank you. If it weren’t for the two of you, we wouldn’t have made it this far.”
At Seoha’s words of comfort, their eyes reddened.
“There was a path. I’m glad we didn’t give up.”
“Once you know this taste, how could you give up?”
Seoha was no exception.
The two of them attached far greater meaning to this project than he had expected. The fact that all three of them shared the same goal and were moving in one direction filled his heart.
“Good.”
Outside the glass window, Whitman gently lowered the brim of his fedora with one hand.
“Master, your teaching was never wrong.”
Whitman murmured softly as he looked at the three of them.
But behind his smile lay the worry he had carried for the past several months.
The fact that MIT’s most talented young people had gathered together was in itself a source of pride and expectation, but at the same time, it was also a source of unease.
‘They’re too young.’
Youth is dazzling, but at times, it can also become a potential risk.
Impatience,
passion too hot,
the strong ego that inevitably accompanies those with outstanding intellect,
and, at times, hearts that shatter all too easily.
If these were not coordinated, a team could easily collapse.
Whitman recalled the past.
Richard Feynman, the peerless genius produced by MIT.
He, too, had once belonged to a team.
Schwinger, Dyson, Tomonaga.
Brilliant geniuses each had their own methods of interpretation and their own stubbornness. Schwinger and Feynman could not even converse. Tomonaga and Schwinger also failed to understand each other until the very end.
And yet, they jointly won the Nobel Prize.
“It was a miracle.”
The four of them had been incapable of collaboration.
They had simply walked different paths and climbed to the summit on their own. What had succeeded was not a team, but the obstinate genius of individuals.
If they had been able to actively collaborate, the landscape of modern physics might have been entirely different from what it was now.
He turned his gaze toward the laboratory beyond the glass window.
Theodore Lanford, Srinivasa Krishnan,
both were students with intellects comparable to Schwinger and Tomonaga. But this team did not create dissonance.
That was likely not solely because of Seoha’s genius, which existed on a different level.
He was an incomparably radiant being, but he also knew how to share that radiance. He drew light out of others, bound those lights together, and created an even greater light.
“I didn’t know he even had talent as a leader.”
Whitman nodded quietly.
He could now completely understand why his teacher had stood in that place.
* * *
New York City Hall,
in the mayor’s office on the top floor of the main building, John was watching TV.
On the screen was the mayor of Boston giving a speech before a great crowd of people.
“Honorable citizens of Boston.”
Click.
Click.
Shutter sounds burst one after another from the press seats.
“Today, we are facing a very important moment.”
He looked around.
It was a time with heavy foot traffic, and citizens who had been passing by had stopped to listen closely to his words.
“For the past several decades, Boston’s traffic has been such a mess that there was no way to describe it except as hell.
This hellish congestion has stolen the precious time of our citizens and caused serious anxiety and chaos, with even ambulances and school buses unable to arrive on time.”
As if choked with emotion, Patrick paused for a moment.
The citizens gathered in the square looked at him with expectant eyes.
Watching them, Patrick felt a boiling thrill rise within him.
“But today! I, myself, will put an end to that history of suffering.
As of today, I hereby declare that the smart traffic system will be operational throughout Boston. Developed under my leadership, it is the world’s finest signal system, operated nowhere else but here in Boston.
Citizens!
The mayor who will lead all these changes—this Patrick—will take responsibility and complete a new Boston!”
Citizens waving their hands, banners fluttering behind him.
Patrick’s confident face. John looked at it and grimaced fiercely.
[PTRICK = FUTURE]
[BOSTON LEADS AMERICA]
“He looks as if he’s become president.”
A shabby place that could not even compare to New York—the mayor of that insignificant city was appearing on a national broadcast, shouting toward the entire American public.
The female reporter also looked unable to hide her excitement. She stood with Boston Square as her backdrop, holding a microphone.
Office workers in suits, young couples pushing strollers, even elderly people were all smiling broadly and waving at the camera.
“The Boston Transportation Department has announced that since the introduction of the new system, average downtown commuting time has decreased by 31.8%, while congestion time on major arterial roads has fallen by approximately 38%.
The incidence of traffic accidents at intersections has also been calculated to have decreased by 26% compared to the previous year.
These groundbreaking traffic improvements have led to public support, and Mayor Patrick’s approval rating currently ranks an overwhelming first among heads of local governments nationwide.
Experts are even offering analyses that Mayor Patrick may enter the presidential race in the future.”
Beep—
John turned off the TV and threw the remote control roughly.
“What happened with bringing in Alan?”
New York was second to none in the world when it came to traffic hell.
After seeing the news, complaints from citizens were pouring in. John, whose low approval rating made reelection uncertain, had decided to scout Alan, the leader of the Boston signal optimization project.
“Well...”
His aide wore a troubled expression.
“What? We offered him triple his salary, and he still said no?”
The aide shook his head.
“That’s not it. He said that even if he came, he wouldn’t be able to produce results like Boston’s.”
A vein bulged at John’s temple.
“What? What’s the reason?”
“He said New York is structurally far too different from Boston, making direct application difficult.
Its area, population and traffic density, and on top of that, its subway, bus, rail, and private vehicle networks are all entangled with one another in a complex web.”
“Who doesn’t know New York’s traffic is complicated? So he’s saying there’s no way?”
“Well... He said that since he had no confidence, if we were truly desperate, we should seek out the designer of the system.”
“The designer? Alan wasn’t the one who made it?”
The aide opened the file he had prepared and read from it.
“It was apparently a system devised by the MIT Department of Mathematics.
The supervising director was Harold Whitman, and the person who created the core algorithm was...”
John gestured impatiently for him to continue.
“Name.”
The aide brought his face close to the document.
Then, after confirming that he had not misread it, he opened his mouth.
“They say it’s an undergraduate student there named Yu Seoha.”
“What?”
John’s eyes gleamed.
It was a name he had heard before. A mathematical genius whose value had been rising rapidly of late.
‘Since he’s an undergraduate, it should be easier to put him to work, right?’
To bring in a professor-level talent, one had to negotiate with the university.
It was only natural for the price to be high and the conditions to be numerous.
But he was still an undergraduate. There should be plenty of room for negotiation.
“Bring him here. Right now!”