Whitman stood before the blackboard, chalk in hand.
The hard sensation at his fingertips felt strangely unfamiliar, yet welcome. In recent years, he had grown accustomed to a life of administration rather than research.
The title of dean had given him authority, but it had taken away his identity as a mathematician.
“Can I really do this?”
“Won’t I only end up humiliating myself?”
Idle thoughts would not leave his mind.
After receiving the Abel Prize, Whitman had, before he knew it, grown complacent.
Amid the praise of his colleagues and the respectful gazes of his students, he had slowly become a coward.
He was afraid of being wrong.
An academic error meant the collapse of authority. If he stepped back, at the very least, he thought he might be remembered as an elegant old scholar.
In that instant, many faces flashed through his mind.
A university classmate who had spent his entire life clinging to an unsolved problem and ended it in a psychiatric hospital, and the countless students who, unable to endure the stress of the proof process, had left academia for Wall Street.
“Do I have any right to blame them?”
Whitman gave a bitter smile.
Seoha had thrown herself into an unsolved problem at the mere age of seven. And simply because she did not like the answer!
If even a child could muster the courage, then for an old soldier who had received the Abel Prize to turn his head away in order to protect his reputation was a humiliation too great to bear.
Suddenly, anger toward himself surged up inside him.
“I’m the teacher! If I can’t set an example, then what am I doing!”
Tap!
An equation was written on the blackboard.
Once he began, the decades of mastery that had lain dormant poured out like a waterfall. There was no more hesitation. Whitman had returned to the young mathematician of half a century ago, the one who had been captivated by the beauty of mathematics and stayed up through the night.
***
The dean’s office of the MIT Department of Physics.
Leonard did not like the way things had been going lately.
“Damn it!”
He irritably pushed away Felix’s paper lying on his desk.
For the past few years, the MIT Department of Physics had been enjoying a golden age. After Seoha proved the relationship between quantum chaos and the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function, derivative papers had come pouring out.
New physical interpretations had been added, led by the postdocs who had witnessed the proof firsthand. The spectra of chaotic systems, quantum ergodicity, even the information theory of black holes.
Once the high-energy distribution of abstruse quantum mechanics could be explained through the order of the Riemann zeros, the MIT Department of Physics enjoyed the benefits with its whole body, receiving attention from academia and the media day after day.
But after Felix and Arthur’s presentation, the atmosphere had begun to turn strangely.
“Has the Riemann Hypothesis really been solved? And on a basis of physics, no less?”
Leonard put on his glasses, picked up the paper again, and examined it. Felix had overlaid Seoha’s theory with overwhelming data and created a framework for deriving a mathematical operator.
“Hmm.”
At a glance, it seemed to inherit and develop Seoha’s theory. The public and the media had already been dazzled by the splendid exterior, praising him as though he were humanity’s savior.
And yet his intuition, honed through a lifetime devoted to physics research, told him that something here was wrong. In the end, Leonard decided to seek advice from someone who would know.
Knock, knock!
Leonard’s eyes widened when he opened the door to the dean’s office of the Department of Mathematics and stepped inside.
“Good God, what are you doing?”
Whitman was not dressed in his usual neat manner.
His hair was sticking out in every direction, and perhaps because he had misplaced his jacket somewhere, he was wearing only a shirt despite the cold weather. He smiled with an awkward expression, his hand covered in white chalk dust.
“What brings you all the way here?”
Instead of answering, Leonard stared blankly at his hand.
“You couldn’t have been giving a lecture, so why is your hand like that?”
“Ahem! There is a reason. Ah! As it happens, there was something I wanted to ask you. Would you come inside?”
When he opened the door attached to the side of the office, a seminar room appeared.
The large blackboard that filled the room was packed with equations, without a single empty space.
“D-did you do all of this by yourself?”
Leonard approached the blackboard and read the formulas.
For no reason, Whitman felt embarrassed and wiped his sweat with his shirt sleeve. Chalk dust smeared white across his face.
Seeing that, Leonard chuckled.
“No, Dean!”
An Abel Prize winner and the head of MIT’s Department of Mathematics was covered in chalk dust like a newly admitted graduate student.
Looking at the paper in Leonard’s hand, Whitman said,
“That paper has been bothering me. Seoha and Elijah were of the same opinion.”
Leonard’s eyes flashed open.
“Ah! I knew it!”
It had not been delusion.
He had secretly been suspecting himself, wondering whether he had been blinded by jealousy and was disparaging the fine achievement of a fellow scholar.
But if Whitman, a giant of the mathematical world, and the greatest geniuses of the current era felt the same sense of incongruity, then the story was different.
“I also found some parts strange.”
A discussion began on the spot.
As it happened, neither of them had anything particularly urgent to do. The university had been showing consideration to the old professors who were approaching retirement.
That paper had originally begun as a theory in physics. Leonard’s joining was like gaining a mighty army for Whitman. As the parts where Leonard had felt a sense of strangeness passed through Whitman’s mathematical interpretation, the range of where they ought to look began to narrow.
One day, two days. And before they knew it, a month had passed.
The two old professors keenly realized the fact that they were no longer young.
Whenever their progress was blocked or their stamina ran low, they went outside for a walk. They had each spent half a century at MIT. The two often sank into reminiscence and recalled the past.
“Let’s sit here for a bit.”
It was early winter, but the sunlight was warm.
His gaze on the bench was gentle. It was a place where Whitman’s teacher had often become lost in thought.
“The times have changed a great deal.”
Leonard spoke as if lamenting while looking around.
“What is there to say? Time cannot be stopped.”
“But we are fortunate. We have at least left small traces in the textbooks our students will learn from.”
“Is that not the essence of scholarship? We, too, merely took one more step on a path someone else had paved, and now our final duty is to lie down so the next generation can step on our backs and pass on.”
Whitman leaned against the back of the bench and stared into the air. The cold winter air sank deep into his lungs.
“Come to think of it… I understand now.”
He tapped the fallen leaves piled on the ground with the end of his cane.
“What do you mean?”
“When I first saw their paper, I felt uncomfortable. Strange, isn’t it? The proof of the Riemann Hypothesis was supposed to be one of the long-cherished wishes of the mathematical world… It should have been something to rejoice over, but I did not feel that way at all.”
“Hmm. I think I felt the same.”
“The answer was simple. I think I felt a kind of insult.”
“Insult?”
“There is a manner befitting the solution of a Millennium-level problem. You might call it dignity. Andrew Wiles completed Fermat’s Last Theorem by binding together algebra and geometry, which had been separated for centuries.
And what of the Poincaré Conjecture? Perelman succeeded in replacing a problem of topology with thermodynamic flow and defining the shape of the universe. We mathematicians felt ecstasy when we looked at them.
It was as though a piece of a puzzle hidden by God had been found by human hands and fitted back into its rightful place. Inheriting and developing the legacy accumulated over centuries, and in doing so, taking one step forward. But they…”
“They will leave behind no legacy at all. It is nothing more than showing off the performance of their hardware.”
“Even if it is true, I cannot acknowledge it. The Riemann Hypothesis was not a problem that should have been solved in this way!”
There was no beauty, no awe.
A proof that beat every visible possibility into submission through overwhelming computational force.
“That is not inheritance, but theft. Violence wielded without any aesthetics whatsoever, solely to seize the trophy called results!”
His voice was low, but the resolute anger emanating from his entire body made Leonard feel solemn.
“Hahaha! Now I understand why you adore Seoha.”
At the thought of Seoha, Whitman’s face brightened.
“Why do you think so?”
“Because Seoha is the rightful heir, of course.”
Whitman nodded with a firm expression.
“From Pythagoras before the Common Era to Wiles and Elijah Kronen of the modern age. It would not be wrong to say that mathematics is the totality of all the intellect humanity has accumulated thus far. Seoha is a child who has inherited that legacy of thousands of years without missing a single piece.”
His eyes were filled with pride and affection for Seoha.
“Seoha’s mathematics is full of affection and respect for the great masters of each era. And yet, while doing so, she is finding and walking her own path. I do not know for certain, but I believe she will leave a richer legacy to future generations than anyone in the past.”
And they would pass along the path Seoha had paved and head toward an unknown land humanity had yet to set foot in. This was the proper form of mathematics to which he had devoted his entire life.
“She truly lacks nothing to be called the darling of modern mathematics.”
Silence flowed between them.
From afar came the lively laughter of students crossing the campus.
“That is why our responsibility is heavy, is it not? We may only be scholars in name who inherited that legacy, but we should at least clear away the filth piled on the path our disciples must walk.”
“Hmm… But it will not be easy.”
“…Their defensive logic is sturdier than expected. Well, if they are bold enough to intimidate the entire world, it could hardly be sloppy. Still, we have a compass, so an answer will come someday, but…”
After pondering for a long while, Leonard suddenly burst into laughter as if something had occurred to him.
“What on earth are we doing right now?”
“Mm? What do you mean?”
“I mean, we are the deans of the two most established departments at MIT, so why are the two of us miserably racking our brains over this alone?
If we combine the master’s and doctoral students and postdocs under us, aren’t there hundreds? We have hordes of the smartest people in the world at our disposal, and yet…”
Whitman’s eyes flashed open.
Obsessed with the thought that he wanted to resolve it quietly, he had forgotten the most powerful weapon he possessed.
Power!
“That’s right!”
With solemn expressions, Whitman and Leonard returned to their respective departments.
One hour later, the same announcement was posted on the bulletin boards of both departments.
[Recruitment Notice for the On-Campus Riemann Hypothesis Verification TF]
The notice began in a very courteous tone.
It had a rather grand preface about this being a mission and duty of the age, and a gentle closing that expressed a hope for voluntary participation.
However, the details written below suggested that this was by no means a matter of choice.
[Participation in this project will be recognized for credits and research achievements. However, in the event of nonparticipation without special cause, an in-depth interview with the dean is scheduled to take place during the next laboratory assignment and fellowship review.]
Groans burst out among the master’s and doctoral students and postdocs who heard the news.
“How is this voluntary participation!”
“Just because the other side is an allied army of mathematics and physics, do we have to do this too?”
A few days later, hundreds of elites gathered in the main auditorium of Building 7.
Whitman and Leonard stood on the platform, looking at them with satisfied expressions.
In later years, those who had participated in this project would not hesitate to use the expression “Total Mobilization” when recalling the event of that day.