“Good evening, viewers.
On Science and the City this week, we have news that has set the entire country abuzz.”
The camera slowly closed in on the anchor.
His voice was pitched slightly higher than usual, and from his demeanor one could sense that he was struggling to suppress his excitement.
“A few days ago, Science, the world’s most prestigious academic journal, introduced a paper on the cover of its latest issue. And immediately after its release, this paper triggered a chain reaction not only in academia, but also in industry and politics.”
The screen changed to show the cover of Science.
It was an image visualizing energy in motion, flowing and flowing until it gathered into a vast lake.
And at the bottom center was the headline:
[Mathematics Always Knows the Answer.]
—Minimum Energy Theory
“The authors of the paper are Team Apex from MIT’s Department of Mathematics. And astonishingly, two Korean students are members of that team. Joining us today is Professor Kim Jiyun of KAIST, who has ties to both of them.”
“Welcome, Professor.”
The camera zoomed out, showing the entire studio.
A woman in a neat suit bowed in greeting.
“Thank you for inviting me.”
The anchor smiled and continued.
“First, for our viewers, let me ask a simple question.
If you were to summarize this paper in one sentence, what kind of research would you say it is?”
Professor Kim Jiyun thought for a moment, then carefully opened her mouth.
“There was a mathematician named Claude Shannon.
He was the person who transformed information from an abstract sense into a measurable number. After that, every application related to information followed his definition.
In the sense that it changes the paradigm of energy, I think this paper occupies a similar position. If I were to summarize it in one sentence, it would be this.”
She drank some water and caught her breath.
“Minimum energy is a consequence that appears only when a structure capable of reaching it has been established.”
The anchor nodded.
“That’s very easy to understand. Thank you for the clear explanation.
You know the two students well, don’t you? Would it be fair to call this a triumph for Korean science, Professor?”
“Hmm... It’s complicated.
Yu Seoha was a student I had been watching closely since elementary school. Even at that young age, he was a genius who already possessed a firm mathematical aesthetic.
She tends to be overshadowed by Yu Seoha, but Sujeong is also a talent with tremendous ambition. I wanted to teach her well and raise her into a world-class cryptographer, but...”
Jiyun’s face grew gloomy.
Number theory, which Sujeong had been interested in, was her field of expertise.
Sujeong’s departure, after she had thought of her as a fish already caught, was a tremendous source of regret for her.
“Haha! Sujeong was a KAIST student, wasn’t she? From your position, Professor, I suppose you would feel disappointed.”
When the anchor responded with a laugh, light laughter spread through the studio.
“I am disappointed. Very much so.”
She spoke honestly.
“Im Sujeong was a student who would have become someone great if she had come into cryptography. Above all, that tenacious personality of hers was an excellent quality for raising a cryptographer.
I simply didn’t realize that her obsession was directed elsewhere. The two of them were senior and junior from the same high school, you see. They went to the IMO together as well, and they must have been constantly compared.”
“Now this is something new.”
“You asked whether this paper was a national triumph. The Korean mathematics community failed to contain these two geniuses. Scholars have no choice but to seek out better research environments.
I hope this occasion leads to greater national support for mathematics...”
└I was going to skip it because it was about math, but why did I end up watching all the way to the end?
└Same. I started paying attention from the word “obsession.”
└She followed him all the way to MIT, right? Goosebumps ㄷㄷㄷ
└Someone who was constantly compared to him followed him to the end and got her name on the same paper. How hard must she have worked? Her life is a movie.
└Info) Im Sujeong is Korea’s only IMO gold medalist for two consecutive years. People are packaging her as a hard worker, but she was just a monster from the sprout.
└Info 2) Im Sujeong’s high school nickname was “Demon King.” Because she never came down from first place in the entire gifted high school.
└She was overwhelmingly number one in university too. She just found a place that matched her level.
└Shut up! From now on, you’re a math-genius obsessive girl.
└Our proud seniors. Especially Senior Seoha, he’s a legend even the freshmen all know. The principal might build a memorial hall soon.
└Seoha has to go to the army soon, right?
└The division commander will probably make him tutor his kids lolol
└Duck Lord, you’re doing well. We’re all staying healthy too. Whenever Duck Lord appears on the news, I brag about you to my friends!
* * *
“One copy of Science, please.”
Gyeoul spoke as she tightened her scarf.
The kiosk owner glanced at her, then nodded.
“A lot of people have been looking for this lately. Did something happen?”
“I guess so.”
Gyeoul played along, pretending she knew nothing.
Her shoulders rose for no reason.
After returning to the dormitory, Gyeoul opened the box she had kept in the corner of her closet.
Inside, it was packed full of various scientific journals, including Nature and Science, the New York Times Magazine whose cover Seoha had appeared on, and all kinds of newspapers.
Gyeoul was buying and collecting every piece of material that mentioned Seoha without exception.
Short interviews in newspapers, conference special issues, even supplements from obscure journals—she collected them regardless of type.
“I should at least read it, though.”
Careful not to crease it, she took out the magazine.
After turning a few pages, she found the feature article.
“Did he get taller again?”
She could see Seoha standing in front of a blackboard.
His face, head tilted as he was lost in thought, looked so much like the Seoha she had seen in the music room that she laughed.
‘Mental preparation complete.’
Every time she opened the box, she found herself thinking that she, too, wanted to hurry up and be featured on the cover of BBC Music Magazine or Piano Today.
“Ugh, it’s cold.”
Gyeoul blew on her gloved hands and headed for the practice room.
The practice rooms at Curtis were always quiet. So silent that even the sound of breathing seemed as if it would become a disturbance.
The students here were all people who had grown used to being called geniuses.
People who had stood on international stages since childhood, and who carried both firm standards of their own and wounds at the same time. Gyeoul found the air here suffocating.
Her roommate did not speak all day, and the student next door reacted nervously to even the slightest note.
Amid all that, Gyeoul often—no, frequently—became alone.
“I miss the older girls.”
When she was in Korea, everyone in her class had adored Gyeoul, who was much younger than they were.
But here, everyone was a competitor.
‘Get a grip.’
Gyeoul clenched her fists tightly with a stiff expression.
If she had intended to whine, she would never have come to Curtis in the first place. But no matter how firmly she steeled herself, what was hard remained hard.
Among them, what Gyeoul found most difficult was dealing with Lawrence, a professor and conductor.
Once the music director of the New York Philharmonic, said to stand at the pinnacle of the classical music world, he was well known to the public by the nickname “the incarnation of perfectionism.”
During the era when he conducted it, the New York Phil was famous for its flawless precision, and at the same time notorious among musicians as the most difficult orchestra to perform with.
“Again.”
The cold voice that had rung out. Gyeoul’s shoulders had flinched as she played.
His sensitive ears never missed even the smallest mistakes that others could not perceive.
“Hoo.”
Gyeoul took a deep breath, then sat in front of the piano.
Out of habit, she pulled the chair forward and checked the position of the footrest. Then she closed her eyes and began to play.
‘Ducky’s Theme.’
It was a piece Seoha had composed.
Ever since coming to Curtis, Gyeoul always played this piece before practicing.
Ding—
A low, solid chord settled across the floor, and a slender melody was added above it.
When she first heard him play it, she had thought it was far too heavy a piece.
But now she knew.
Seoha carried worries inside him that he could not speak of.
‘What were you thinking when you wrote a piece like this?’
Gyeoul’s hands danced elegantly over the keys.
A piece with no clear introduction, development, turn, and conclusion, yet strangely persuasive; a piece that simply flowed in silence, like the sound of Seoha’s heartbeat she had heard that day.
Thump, thump.
Gyeoul felt Seoha’s breathing in this piece. And then her heart began to settle.
Before she knew it, the piece had ended.
‘All right. Now let’s practice.’
Her body and mind had both reached their best state.
Just as Gyeoul was about to play her assigned piece, a familiar voice came from behind her.
“Could you play that piece once more?”
Startled nearly out of her skin, Gyeoul turned around.
“P-Professor Lawrence?”
“Please.”
His expression looked serious.
Gyeoul nodded and began playing the piano again.
He leaned loosely against the doorframe and closed his eyes.
Lawrence had been on his way back after finishing a rehearsal for a performance scheduled for the following month.
He had been organizing the next program in his head when he heard an unfamiliar piece from afar.
‘Hm?’
Even when considering the entire world, he was a conductor who could be counted on one hand.
Over several decades, he had listened to tens of thousands of pieces. And in most cases, he could gauge the overall character of a piece from just the first few measures.
‘Strange.’
A piece in which a single theme continued obsessively—and yet there was not a single familiar language.
In general, when a subject appears, the next voice is expected to follow with an answer. But this piece had none of that.
Lawrence’s brow furrowed faintly.
The theme appeared and variations followed, but nowhere did traditional contrast or resolution emerge. Even so, the piece did not collapse.
‘Why?’
He began nodding along as he concentrated on the piece.
‘There isn’t a single repetition.’
The same melody, the same harmony, never appeared again even once.
That was why, to ears hearing it for the first time, it felt like a flow close to improvisation. But through experience, Lawrence could sense that this was not random.
‘Ah! It’s symmetry!’
‘Who composed this?’
This piece concealed an extremely difficult mathematical structure, one that even a conductor of Lawrence’s caliber could only notice after listening for quite some time.
‘To be precise, permutation.’
When the melody changed, the rhythm was maintained; when the rhythm changed, the intervals between pitches were maintained. When the harmony moved, the relative intervals between voices were fixed; when the intervals changed, the directionality of the harmony was maintained.
Inversion, modulation, retrograde, augmentation, diminution.
The theme transformed endlessly, but it did not replicate itself.
It did not overlap, did not repeat, and maintained its flow solely through permutation.
It took Bach’s counterpoint as its starting point, but upon the structure he had built, it had evolved in an entirely different direction.
Before he knew it, the performance had ended.
Gyeoul looked at Lawrence with a face full of questions.
He realized that he had been lost in thought for too long.
“It is a fine piece. Who is the composer?”
The distinction between main melody and accompaniment changed constantly.
Almost every note had a role, without ornamentation.
Above all, the ability to maintain tension without letting the piece explode—this was a control possessed by only an extremely small fraction even among outstanding composers.
Fresh.
He had never in his life heard music with such a thoroughly calculated structure.
Several names flashed through his mind.
The masters of modern classical music.
But the piece he had heard today felt alien no matter which of them he matched it with.
Then a voice came from Gyeoul’s mouth.
“A friend of mine wrote it?”
Lawrence’s eyes widened.
“A friend? Not a professor?”
Gyeoul answered with a troubled expression.
“He’s not a friend who does music. He just wrote it as a hobby...”
His patience snapped.
In a way unlike his usual self, Lawrence ended up flying into a rage in a loud voice.
“What nonsense! Is your friend’s name Johann Sebastian Bach? Who on earth writes a piece like this as a hobby?”
Gyeoul’s blank face.
At the sight of him agitated for the first time, she could not hide her surprise.