Alex had known he was different from others ever since he was very young.
From the age of six, he was already playing chess with adults, and after entering elementary school, he had never lost once.
He was the junior chess champion of California and a perennial winner of the national mathematics competition. However, the anecdote people remembered most about him was another matter entirely.
It was the day Alex took the SAT at age sixteen.
"Huh?"
In the middle of the math section, his pen stopped.
The conditions didn't add up. The answer the test maker had intended was obvious, but it was clearly wrong.
Scritch.
After a moment of thought, Alex decided to give the test committee what they wanted.
After the exam, he immediately called the administering agency and reported that the question contained an error.
But the response he received was beyond his expectations.
"That item was properly formulated, and even if there is a problem, you will not be disadvantaged."
Only then did Alex realize.
He had chosen the correct answer, and that had been a compromise. If he had intended to protest, he should have left the answer blank.
[Sixteen-Year-Old Student Discovers Error in SAT Problem.]
When he later saw the story about himself in the newspaper, he was startled.
The test committee had acknowledged the error, fearing issues might arise later. The item was invalidated, and Alex ultimately lost points as a result.
"Would it have been better to just stay quiet?"
Alex finally understood the rules of this world.
"Righteous actions do not always bring profit."
From that day forward, he changed his standard for action.
He began weighing efficiency and reward rather than right and wrong.
The incident was heavily reported in the major newspapers.
And the name Alex Howard spread across the nation in an instant, accompanied by the epithet "math genius." His admission to the Stanford mathematics department was a natural next step.
No one doubted it.
He would write papers, aim for the Fields Medal, and one day become a talent who would bring glory to America.
Alex loved mathematics.
Structures without excess, the simplicity that remained when unnecessary assumptions were stripped away one by one, the ecstasy of the moment when conditions scattered along divergent paths converged into a single proposition.
Alex felt peace in that process.
He soon distinguished himself in the mathematical community.
Mathematical analysis and algebra, courses for first-year undergraduates, were too easy for him. Before he even became a sophomore, he had co-authored major papers as an undergraduate, and his single-author papers also received high praise in academia.
"A talent fit to lead the world of mathematics in the future."
Yet despite such public praise, a question lingered in his mind.
"Mathematics laid all the foundations, so why does engineering always take the money?"
Banners emblazoned with corporate logos hung without end in the engineering building. By contrast, the mathematics department was always quiet.
The research funding itself was at a level too embarrassing to compare.
Theories that mathematicians had refined over decades passed into engineers' hands and became patents and products.
"We're just like miners, aren't we?"
Mathematicians venture deep underground, taking risks to extract raw ore.
But others were the ones who processed and sold it to amass wealth. Mathematics was beautiful, but from the perspective of efficiency and reward that he valued, there was no more inefficient discipline than this.
"This structure is unfair."
No, the word unfair was far too weak. It ought to be called exploitation. This absurd relationship between mathematics and engineering.
His choice was swift and bold.
He gave up on pursuing a Ph.D. and took engineering and business school courses concurrently. Then, an ability that other students lacked began to emerge in him.
He had naturally mastered the art of packaging mathematical insight as a commodity.
Arc Wave.
The consulting firm he founded quickly established itself in the industry.
With his uniquely brilliant mathematical mind, he solved chronic problems plaguing corporations time and again.
When dealing with companies, the questions Alex valued were always the same.
-What is the goal of this system?
-How is success measured?
The event that made Arc Wave's name widely known in the industry was a project for a global logistics company.
The project name was grandiose.
Next-Generation Enterprise-Wide Logistics Optimization System.
It was a plan to bind hundreds of warehouses, thousands of vehicles, real-time demand forecasting, and route optimization into a single AI. Internal engineering teams and external engineering consultants had been mobilized, and the budget alone exceeded two hundred million dollars.
The problem was that no results were coming out at all.
The model was complete but caused frequent errors in the field.
There had been improvements in simulations, but in actual operations, delays had only increased. When asked for the cause of the failures, the engineers always repeated the same thing.
"We still don't have enough data."
"It just needs a bit more training."
Then, one of the board members called in Alex, who was just making a name for himself in the industry.
At the first meeting, he asked this:
"What is the goal?"
The engineers' answers were a sight to behold.
Maximize revenue, minimize inventory, reduce delivery times, cut logistics costs.
'Unbelievable.'
Alex shook his head.
Engineers were always like this. They set mathematically impossible goals and then found some suitable point of convergence. The costs of failure along the way were all borne by the company.
'So these are the people who were exploiting us?'
A flicker of contempt crossed Alex's eyes.
He spoke, looking at the CEO.
"Fire the person in charge immediately.
This model is designed to match demand as closely as possible. But the inventory management algorithm is set to minimize the risk of stockouts. Meanwhile, the logistics model moves in the direction of reducing storage and transportation costs."
He drew three arrows on the board.
They were pointing in different directions.
"A stupid system like this could never work properly. I'll ask you directly. What is your true goal?"
"Hmm."
"Well..."
While the board members struggled to answer, the CEO spoke with a smile.
"Reducing logistics and transportation costs while maintaining delivery reliability. And if we want to maximize profits at the same time, is that too much to ask?"
Alex nodded.
"Of course it's possible."
He ordered the design of a new system.
The core principle was simple.
'Orders are now decision variables, not outcomes.'
-The system only accepts orders that can be fulfilled after reflecting inventory and logistics costs in real time.
-Orders that fail to meet the conditions are deliberately delayed or rejected.
What Arc Wave designed was a decision gate.
When an order came in, the prediction model calculated the final cost of the order. And if the cost exceeded the baseline, it was rejected.
The effects of the new system were dramatic.
Revenue decreased slightly, but net profit increased by double digits, and delivery satisfaction also rose significantly. Above all, complaints from the field disappeared. The CEO, highly satisfied with the results, paid him a massive consulting fee.
It was the moment he secured the capital to grow his company overnight.
Afterward, Alex actively expanded the company.
He searched for profitable papers, read them, and hunted down their authors to scout them. Mathematicians were generally poor and pure, making it difficult for them to refuse his offers.
And he drew up blueprints for applying those papers as technology, then sold them to companies in need.
At some point, the mathematics community began calling him by a nickname rather than his name.
'Faust.'
The man who, despairing of reality, sold his soul to the devil.
Alex laughed heartily upon hearing that he was called by such a nickname.
Around that time, a student caught his eye.
Theodore Langford—he was making as much of a name for himself in academia as Alex had during his undergraduate days. His paper on topological critical points reeked of money.
If Alex scouted him and cultivated an engineering perspective in him, they could create risk modeling that every insurance company would want. But the meeting did not go as planned.
"Huh? Why me?"
Theo, upon receiving the recruitment offer, waved his hand dismissively and refused the offer flatly.
"You know, analysis and topology are the fields in mathematics that make the least money. But I can help you implement your theory in reality. Massive wealth is a bonus. You have nothing to lose."
He shook his head as if scoffing.
"I want a theorem with my name on it. I'm going to solve a Millennium Prize Problem and turn the world upside down. So get lost, Faust."
It was something that had happened long ago.
Clack.
Alex set his coffee cup down on the table.
Soon after, Theodore appeared in the cafe wearing a black coat. He glanced at Alex and sat in the chair across from him.
"Just the point."
A short, dry voice.
The day before, Theo had received a call from Alex asking to meet.
Though the situation had become twisted, he had come to the meeting place thinking he would at least hear what Alex had to say.
"Don't be so grumpy. Do you know how many mathematicians have gotten rich because of me? If it weren't for me, they'd all be barely making a living."
"The point."
Alex sighed.
"Withdraw the paper. Then there won't be any problems."
Theo looked up at him.
"Why? Did a contract get screwed up because of our paper?"
Alex's brows furrowed.
Theo's guess was correct. Arc Wave had contracts with various companies, and Team Apex's paper fundamentally denied the implicit assumptions that their models relied upon.
What corporations truly feared was not the financial loss this would cause.
It was admitting before the public that the company's model could mathematically fail, and from that moment on, the consulting firm that had designed the model could not evade responsibility.
"Withdraw the paper. I'll make a way for you. Let's just call it a genius's delusion. This field has no answer anyway. It's a competition over who can approximate closest with wrong answers."
Alex had classified the minimum energy problem as one without an answer.
It was a judgment he could make because he knew mathematics well.
"Hahaha!"
Theo laughed loudly, as if amused.
But Alex merely shrugged.
"Laugh all you want. The situation that's about to unfold won't be so pleasant for you."
Theo suddenly stopped laughing and glared at Alex.
"You have an inferiority complex toward Seoha, don't you?"
"What?"
"That broadcast—there must have been a better way, but the more I think about it, the more unlike you it was. But now that I've met you today, I understand. The spotlight, expectations, and praise Seoha is receiving right now—surely you aren't thinking that could have been you, are you?"
Alex, who usually kept his emotions hidden, could not maintain his composure in that moment.
His face flushed bright red with anger and shame.
"Hahaha! You don't have to answer. I'll take that as a yes!"
Alex's hand holding the coffee cup trembled.
Why had he disliked Yu Seoha?
While scouting for mathematicians, he had seen and heard his name countless times. The first emotion he felt toward him was pity.
'To waste such talent merely proving the Four Color Theorem.'
When Yu Seoha completely overhauled Boston's traffic signal system, Alex had thought that if he had been by his side, he could have made him earn a hundred times as much. Up until then, he had regarded Yu Seoha as nothing more than wasted talent.
But when he heard the news that Yu Seoha had solved the Smale problem, his emotion turned to shock for the first time. And now, he was tackling the minimum energy problem—the hardest of the hard problems.
'Could I have become like that too?
If only I hadn't compromised that day and left the answer sheet blank.'
He shook his head, casting off the thought.
'It's already in the past.'
Alex looked straight at Theo and said,
"If the contracts are terminated, Arc Wave intends to file a massive lawsuit for damages against you. You disrupted the market with a paper that hasn't been conclusively proven and damaged the trust our company holds."
Theo bared his teeth in a grin.
"Do whatever you want. We have confidence. Public debates, colloquiums—we welcome anything. Even in court."
Screech.
He had heard everything that needed to be heard.
Theo pushed back his chair and rose from his seat. And before leaving, he looked at Alex and added,
"Ah! And you seem to think of yourself as nothing more than an unlucky Seoha, but I wanted to tell you that's a grave misconception."
Alex's brows furrowed.
"Why is that? Because I'm Faust? Faust was the man who sold his soul for an ideal. In other words, he never gave up on his ideals and truth until the very end."
Theo shook his head and laughed.
"No, it's because you're Mephistopheles, the collector of mathematicians' souls. At least Faust staked his own soul."
"What?"
"You never had it from the beginning. A mathematician's soul.
So if I had to put it, you're... a merchant who's good at calculating? Not that that's a bad thing."
Theo walked out of the cafe without waiting for an answer.
Alex stared at the cold coffee for a long time.