When Seha left after being summoned by the dean, silence settled over the lab.
“......”
“......”
“I never thought we’d end up being the ones pursued.”
Sri spoke as if sighing.
Cambridge was the university that had produced Newton himself. If a professor from a university revered as a holy ground of mathematics had made an official announcement, it likely meant the theory was already in its final stage.
For all they knew, dozens of eminent scholars were probably gathered by now, clinging to its verification.
“At times like this, I wonder if even the mathematical world has been swallowed by capital. Modern problems are hard to research without supercomputers, after all.
Our environment isn’t bad either, but a Munich-Cambridge alliance...”
Cambridge and Oxford had been rivals for hundreds of years.
Cecilia frowned, her expression sulky.
“With flagship professors from both universities stepping forward, it’s certainly threatening. How many resources do you think they’ve poured into this?”
Even Sujeong, who had little interest in academia, knew those names.
Ben’s hands were trembling.
“The University of Munich receives priority allocation of computing resources from the LRZ—the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. On top of that, Felix is the typical power-seeking scientist.
The fact that he’s joined hands with Professor Arthur of Cambridge means there’s a high probability there was a national-level agreement. And the Cambridge Newton Institute alone has dozens of postdocs......”
A wave offensive from the Anglo-German allied forces. Meanwhile, their side had six people. Not even enough to form a squad.
Then Theo, who had been silent until now, opened his mouth.
“You’re all mistaken.”
Everyone’s gaze turned to Theo.
“They’re people who couldn’t even have begun without the paper Seha tossed to them. Is it really that frightening that gentlemen like that are gathering together and making noise?”
Even if hundreds and thousands gathered holding torches, they would not become the sun.
He had absolute faith in Seha.
“That’s true.”
“I also doubt they could have discovered something over there that Seha hadn’t thought of.”
“Still, we can’t let our guard down. Professor Arthur isn’t someone to take lightly.”
“B-but what is Seha especially good at?”
At Sri’s question, Theo tilted his head.
“Hm?”
“We all have specialties. Sujeong is strong in number theory, and Theo, you’re strong in analysis. But when I look at Seha sometimes, it feels like there’s nothing he doesn’t know. Even in engineering and physics.”
“Ah, is that what you meant?”
Theo shook his head and laughed.
“Seha’s amount of knowledge is beyond imagination. He can sometimes devour several major journal-level papers in a single day. I asked him once because I was curious, and apparently, whenever he comes across a concept he doesn’t know, he looks it up one by one and studies it.”
“T-then.”
“If he read several papers like that, it means there wasn’t anything that tripped him up. Mathematics is deeply intertwined with engineering and physics, so he must have inevitably passed through them beforehand.
That vast body of knowledge is combined with Seha’s superhuman thinking. To him, the boundaries between academic fields probably never existed in the first place.”
“He’s like Newton.”
Cecilia nodded.
Newton could not explain the physical phenomena he had discovered with the mathematics of his time. The tool he created to prove them was calculus.
To him, mathematics and physics surely had not been separate languages.
“Then can we say Seha’s specialty is the breadth of his knowledge?”
“No, that’s just his basic disposition. If this were a game, it’d be like a passive skill. Seha is good at everything, but he’s especially outstanding in two areas to the point that there’s no one to compare him to.”
Snap!
“I know one of them. Intuition, right?”
Sri cut in, snapping his fingers.
“Every Indian reads a biography of Ramanujan when they’re young, but to be honest, I thought all the anecdotes about the goddess Namagiri giving him the answers were made up after his death.
You could call it a kind of national marketing to deify him.
Logically speaking, it makes no sense that he knew the answers to those complicated infinite series without even a proof process. But while researching with Seha, I began to think it might actually be possible.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Historically, there have only been a few people with Seha’s level of mathematical intuition. You could probably count them on one hand.”
“What’s the other one?”
At Sujeong’s question, Theo’s expression turned pleased.
“Geometry.
I guarantee you, for this one, you don’t need a hand. One finger would be enough. Seha’s talent for geometry is so outstanding that unless it’s Euclid, there’s no one to compare him to.”
The difficulty of modern geometry was beyond words.
It had long since gone far beyond the level of handling two-dimensional figures or solids in three-dimensional space. The terrifying thing about this field was that it completely ignored the limits of human vision.
Once a figure reached even four dimensions, human thought could no longer draw its shape. There were many manifolds in geometry that were physically impossible to visualize, so it was unavoidable.
That was why algebraic geometry had appeared. Even mathematicians, relying on abstract formulas, had fled into saying, “Since the equation is like this, perhaps it has this sort of shape?”
“Seha can freely rotate high-dimensional structures as if they were apples in the palm of his hand. And while doing that, he makes a face like, ‘Why can’t you see this?’”
“Ah!”
Sujeong let out an exclamation as if she had remembered something.
“He’s been like that since he was little. No matter how difficult a geometry problem was, he knew the answer the moment he saw it. Now I understand.”
“Would a Seha like that have missed the possibility Professor Arthur saw? I’m extremely skeptical. Perhaps this ‘innovative clue’ they claim to have found is logic Seha already concluded was a dead end and threw in the trash.”
Ben made a mischievous face.
“Then they’re rejoicing while holding a bomb. If they’ve made the stage this big, it won’t end with mere humiliation.”
“Let’s wait and see who wins. Our research seems to be finding its direction too.”
The geometric figure that had begun with Cecilia and been completed by Seha. It was a far vaster and more complex subject than they had imagined.
And Apex Lab was now pouring all its resources into that problem.
‘If he’d judged it meaningless, he would have stopped already.’
Theo sensed that Seha had grasped some clue to a solution here.
***
The Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge in England.
Takakakakakak.
Nearly a hundred researchers were seated in front of monitors, typing ceaselessly at their keyboards.
On the large screen installed on the wall, data transmitted from the LRZ center in Bavaria, Germany, was pouring down like a waterfall.
“We have currently verified the zeta function up to 10 to the 16th power. The computational error range is within twenty decimal places, and the correlation coefficient with the operator is maintaining 0.9998.”
At the researcher’s report, Professor Felix nodded in satisfaction. In his tailored suit and expensive watch, he looked more like the CEO of a giant corporation than a scholar.
“It’s beyond imagination. I didn’t think they’d do this much for us.”
An elderly gentleman with snow-white hair, Professor Arthur Pendleton, adjusted his reading glasses and stared at the screen. On the desk beside him lay Seha’s paper, tattered from being read too many times.
He picked up the paper and said,
“How was this possible? Even thinking about it again, it’s truly astonishing. If he hadn’t known the answer in advance, he couldn’t have bound the disordered energy levels of a quantum system in such perfect language.”
At the awe in Arthur’s voice, Felix snorted.
“And what of it? He is too young, and too clumsy. To simply disclose such a valuable discovery—what is that if not the thinking of a greenhorn?
In modern science, as long as there is even the slightest crack in any difficult problem, an answer can be found, even by force. Even if that problem is the Riemann Hypothesis.”
It was a choice he himself would never have made.
Now the world would remember his name as the solver of the Riemann Hypothesis.
‘Do you know? In the history of science, the provider of the idea has always been a supporting actor.’
A smile spread across Felix’s lips.
Alfred Russel Wallace.
He was the founder of biogeography, which served as the theoretical foundation for the theory of natural selection. But after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his name vanished from the public’s mind as if it had been a lie.
‘Who receives the world’s recognition first?’
In the end, that was all there was to it.
That was why, despite Professor Arthur’s attempts to dissuade him, he had insisted on proceeding with the announcement.
“Aren’t we rushing too much? Even the number 10 to the 16th power—ten quadrillion—is but an instant from the perspective of infinity. Of course, I too am convinced this hypothesis is correct. But we need to go through slightly more meticulous mathematical verification...”
“Professor! This is not cowardly behavior. Shouldn’t you fulfill Professor Hardy’s long-cherished wish, even now?”
Felix’s research team in Munich had applied the renormalization group theory used in high-energy physics to the zeta function.
Through overwhelming computation, they had confirmed that the energy of zeros attempting to deviate from the critical line diverged to infinity. Now they only had to reverse-calculate and derive the corresponding mathematical operator......
A conflicted light appeared on Professor Arthur’s face.
It was sufficiently persuasive mathematically and physically. They would not be able to avoid criticism that it was a post hoc construction, but even that was well within the acceptable range in the scientific community.
‘Not announcing this would be a dereliction of duty.’
His heart shifted.
There was no other reason. It was clearly true that their research was the closest among all theories announced so far to proving the Riemann Hypothesis.
With a grave expression, he nodded.
“Very well.”
***
Pffft!
After roughly washing his face, Seha looked into the mirror.
Two months had passed since the announcements by Cambridge and the University of Munich, and every day they were pouring out articles through the media.
[Unprecedented cooperation between British and German academia—will the Riemann Hypothesis finally be solved?]
[Professor Felix: “It will be the greatest historic turning point since the theory of relativity.”]
[Academia in uproar: Has the Riemann Hypothesis already been solved? Under internal verification; official announcement only a matter of time]
But the team did not waver.
Seha was grateful that he was blessed with good people.
“The path to a proof is still uncertain. But there is one thing I’ve become convinced of through our research so far.”
At Seha’s words, everyone’s expression turned tense.
‘Already?’
‘Seha rarely uses the word convinced.’
‘Has he finally caught it?’
“What is it?”
Theo asked on everyone’s behalf.
“If the Riemann Hypothesis is true, then there must be a geometric reason for it.”
Seha drove a wedge into what had been a vague conjecture. Everyone nodded with determined faces.
From that day on, the team’s direction was set.
Beep—
When he opened the door and entered, the lab was filled with heat.
The team members were gathered in clusters in front of the blackboard, engaged in a heated debate. Dozens of sheets of paper rolled across the floor like fallen leaves in late autumn.
“Oh, Seha’s here?”
Theo grinned and waved.
“What did they say? Telling us to hurry up and announce again?”
“Something like that. Since the other side is apparently going to publish their paper soon, I guess they’re getting anxious.”
The team was receiving pressure through various channels.
It wasn’t that they had no theory worth announcing. Over that time, they had accumulated meaningful data through several approaches. But none of them was the proof Seha and the team wanted.
Seha lightly shrugged and approached the blackboard. On it, the projection of the manifold the team had completed over a long period was tangled like an intricate pattern.
The past two months.
Apex had gathered day and night, continuing their research. And Seha had organized the chaos in which various perspectives were mixed.
As they corrected the errors one by one, they came to realize that the geometric pattern that had seemed chaotic contained profound meaning.
‘Mm. I like it.’
Theo wore a satisfied expression.
The team believed in its leader and was moving in one direction. They had only just grasped the clue to the “geometric reason” Seha had spoken of.
‘It’s not something we can announce right away, but.’
But he was not worried.
‘History really does repeat itself.’
Even in November 1915, the one who submitted his paper first had been Hilbert.