Applause and cheers loud enough to make one’s ears ring.
A fervor filled the auditorium, so hot it was hard to believe it came from people who had lived their entire lives in the world of reason and logic.
Seoha slowly turned and looked at them.
Elderly scholars, their faces streaked with tears, giving him a standing ovation; young mathematicians embracing one another as they cheered.
‘It’s over.’
Ducky was rejoicing.
He, who had always been starving—the ego that had gnawed at Seoha’s nerves because it could not endure incompleteness—was feeling perfect satisfaction for the first time in his life.
Seoha was intoxicated by that languid sensation. The satiety of a beast that had swallowed the truth of the vast universe whole. Ducky shuddered as he swam across the flawless web of logic he himself had woven, as if the ultimate order, permitting not the tiniest contradiction nor a single exception, satisfied him beyond measure.
‘Are you at peace now?’
Even when he had proved the four color theorem, Ducky had stayed quiet for a while.
Since the Riemann Hypothesis was a heavyweight problem, Seoha could only hope that, like an anaconda that had swallowed an elephant, it would take him a long time to digest it.
As Ducky sank into the darkness, the sensations of reality rushed in all at once like a tsunami. His brain, driven to the limit over the past few days, and his body, deprived of proper water and nutrition, finally reached their breaking point.
Stagger.
Seoha’s body lost its balance and tilted.
The chalk he had been holding dropped to the floor, and just as his vision was about to go dark, someone firmly caught him by the shoulders.
“I’ve got you!”
Theo, who had run over before anyone knew it, was supporting Seoha while breathing hard. Sujeong approached with a face that looked ready to cry and gently brushed back Seoha’s disheveled hair.
“Seoha! Are you okay? Open your eyes.”
“You pushed yourself too hard. We need to lay him down first.”
Ben, Sri, and even Cecilia ran up. As the members of Team Apex surrounded Seoha, the applause in the hall abruptly ceased, and tension swept through the room.
“Doctor! We have an ambulance waiting outside! Make way at once!”
President Brenner shouted urgently as he approached.
If anything were to happen to this boy in Göttingen, it would leave an indelible stain on the university.
“I’m… fine.”
Seoha barely forced the words out in a cracked voice. His eyelids were heavy, but he did not want to worry anyone.
“I just want to sleep a little.”
With those words, Seoha lost consciousness.
His face was peaceful. As if he were someone who had reached a place of rest after a very long and arduous journey.
A doctor hurried over and checked Seoha’s condition. After confirming the sound of his faint breathing, he let out a sigh of relief.
“It’s simple exhaustion. But he needs absolute rest. We’ll take him by ambulance for now…”
“I’ll carry him.”
Rustle.
Theo carefully lifted Seoha onto his back.
As they descended from the platform and began walking down the aisle, a miraculous sight unfolded. Like the parting of the Red Sea, the mathematicians who had filled the space so tightly there had been no room to step moved aside and made a path.
As they passed, the scholars, as if by unspoken agreement, either bowed their heads or placed a hand over their chests. It was a courtesy paid to the young master who had opened the door to a new era.
The moment Theo opened the auditorium’s oak doors—
Click!
Click!
The flashes of the countless reporters waiting outside went off all at once.
“He’s out!”
“Looks like he collapsed! Is he sick?”
“Move aside for a moment. Keep your order!”
The outsiders and press corps who had been camped out on the lawn surged toward them all at once.
“Is it finally over? Has the Riemann Hypothesis really been proved?”
“Please say a word!”
Theo opened his eyes coldly and said,
“Please move.”
He walked forward without so much as a blink. The heat coming through Seoha’s back was abnormally high. He was so thin that Theo could hardly feel his weight, as if he were carrying a child. It must have been the result of abusing his body for days without eating properly.
‘That must be how desperate you were, too.’
“Please clear the way!”
Ben stepped forward and pushed back the crowd.
Reporters shoved microphones at them from every direction, but Cecilia, Sujeong, and Sri blocked them. Still, it was not enough. Perhaps the rumor had spread, because more and more reporters were gathering. Unable to endure it any longer, Dean Whitman shouted in a thunderous voice.
“Step back! Unless you want a lawsuit from MIT!”
As the reporters flinched at the aged scholar’s tremendous force, the waiting paramedics safely received Seoha.
Wee-woo, wee-woo—
As the sound of the siren faded, complaints from reporters could be heard here and there. One of them spoke loudly, as if intending to be overheard.
“Talk about making a damn fuss. Do they think we don’t know it’s all a show?”
“A show? What do you mean by that?”
Another reporter approached with interest.
“No, just think about it with common sense. Does it make any sense to gather mathematicians in a public venue like this and prove the Riemann Hypothesis?
It’s all a scenario. The proof must have been finished in a lab ages ago, and they’re just acting according to the script, aren’t they? It’s clearly a production meant to turn that young genius into a global star.”
Voices of agreement rose among the journalists.
“Would they really go that far?”
“No, it’s persuasive, isn’t it? I’ve covered the mathematics world for a long time, and I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this.”
“Mathematics has been so far removed from public interest, so the academic world would have a motive to cooperate, too.”
As his remarks gained momentum, he added more.
“The method of proof was strange, too. In this day and age, chalk on a blackboard? Whoever wrote the script must have a taste for the classics.
These days, mathematical theories come out of supercomputers. If they had to write it by hand, there are digital boards, and at the very least, even paper and pen would be more efficient than that.”
It was around the time arrogant conviction began to settle in the reporter’s voice.
“Shut that shallow mouth of yours!”
A voice so cold it froze the spine.
The reporter flinched and turned his head. Dozens of mathematicians, who had poured out of the auditorium after the ambulance, were standing around him as if surrounding him.
Their gazes had sunk coldly.
The traces of awe and joy, the tears they had shed only moments ago, were nowhere to be seen. In their place, the fierce anger and contempt of scholars whose purity had been insulted pierced toward him.
Step.
Andrew Wiles, standing at the head of the group in a rumpled shirt, took one step forward. A sharp light blazed in the eyes of the master who had devoted his life to mathematics.
“Supercomputer? Efficiency?”
He let out a hollow laugh and glared at the reporter.
“You seem to think mathematicians are calculators. I state this with certainty: the geometric space Seoha created today cannot be simulated by any supercomputer currently in existence.”
“N-no, what I meant was, with technology having advanced this far, there’s no reason to insist on chalk…”
“Nonsense!”
The old professor’s lionlike roar rang across the campus.
“A blackboard and chalk are not theatrical props! They are the most intuitive and perfect canvas for bringing the inspiration that flashes inside the human mind into reality.
It has been that way for hundreds of years. The feeling of holding chalk, the sound it makes as it grates against the blackboard. When we hold it, we feel as if we are spiritually connected to the great masters of the past, like Newton. People like you may think there is no meaning in this beyond romance. But to us mathematicians, it is a sensation more important than anything else.”
Whitman, standing beside him, spoke with an enraged expression.
“Seoha must have come to the lecture hall every day with the feeling that he was coughing up blood. Would people like you understand that agony and pain? The finest minds in the world spent several nights awake in tents to follow his logic. And you dare treat us like third-rate actors?”
The reporter turned pale and backed away.
He wanted to argue back, but the names of those standing together were far too weighty. He did not have the courage to keep making baseless claims in front of winners of the three great mathematics prizes and professors from the world’s most prestigious universities.
‘Looks like I won’t need to step in.’
Uhyeon chuckled and stepped back.
Because of his teaching schedule, he had been supposed to return after only watching Seoha receive the Fields Medal. But when news of Seoha reached him afterward, he had no choice but to come back to Germany.
Having barely arrived on the final day, Uhyeon had just watched the proof conclude from the hallway.
‘Is my role as a nanny over now?’
He felt both relieved and wistful.
But he had a feeling there were still things he could do for Seoeun. Shaking his head, he headed toward the hospital where Seoha had been taken.
* * *
Compared to Germany, where the semester begins in early October, classes in the United States start two months earlier.
MIT campus, 10 a.m. Mathematics Department, Room 302.
“Therefore, if we express the convergence condition of the Dirichlet series in terms of the real part…”
Professor Carter stopped mid-lecture and took out his phone.
The students lifted their eyes from their books and looked at him curiously. It was rare for him to stop class. He was someone who did not even take a sip of water during a lecture, let alone check his phone…
“Professor?”
A student sitting in the front row called to him cautiously.
“One moment.”
He was clearly unable to focus on the lecture.
In fact, he had been like that from the first period as well. His hand had stopped while writing on the board, and he had repeated explanations he had already given several times.
Ding.
His phone rang.
Carter put down the chalk and hurriedly picked up the phone.
Just as murmurs began to spread among the students at his uncharacteristic behavior—
“Khak!”
After checking the message, his eyes widened in shock, and he trembled as if suppressing his emotions.
“Professor?”
Carter squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. Then he checked the screen once more. The sender was Dean Whitman. The message was a single photograph and one short sentence.
The photograph showed an enlarged portion of the blackboard.
「Q.E.D.」
—Riemann Hypothesis, Solved.
Leaving behind the students’ puzzled expressions, he shot one hand into the air and let out a cry almost like a scream.
“Yeees! Seoha did it! He finally proved that damn Riemann Hypothesis!”
The students, who had not understood the situation, stared at him blankly. And a few seconds later, a thunderous roar erupted.
“Really?”
“Professor! You’re serious, right?”
“Yes!!!”
“Oh my God! Oh my God!!”
A monumental event in the mathematics world.
Anyone studying at MIT must have dreamed the same dream at least once.
The students sprang from their seats, shouted hurrah, hugged one another, and jumped up and down. MIT’s idol, their direct senior, had solved none other than the Riemann Hypothesis.
The professor, who was usually solemn, was the most passionate of them all.
Like a wrestler who had won a fierce match, he clenched both fists and roared toward the classroom ceiling.
“Yes!!!!”
The classroom instantly turned into chaos.
Someone slapped their palm against a desk. One student, unable to contain his excitement, grabbed a book from the desk and hurled it high into the air.
As if that were the signal, the students began rushing out of the classroom.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
“I don’t know! Anywhere!”
“Just shut up and run!”
A few timid students glanced at Carter, trying to read his mood. He smiled broadly and waved his hand.
“What are you all still doing here?”
Their faces lit up.
““Yahoo!””
As if the situation were the same, the doors of Rooms 301 and 303 on either side opened at the same time.
Thud, thud, crash—
The sound of feet pounding down the stairs, the cheers of students—the ripples that began in the mathematics department spread beyond the building and across the entire campus. Students gathered without even knowing what had happened. They arrived with bewildered faces, listened to the explanation, and soon ran off shouting the same cries.
“Seoha, the genius!”
“Yu Seoha!”
They shouted the name of their proud alumnus until their throats were raw.
The commotion that began on campus spread all the way into Cambridge. Harvard students passing by on the street looked at them as if they had gone mad.
But soon, envy filled their eyes.
[Breaking News: MIT’s Yu Seoha Likely Proves Riemann Hypothesis. Over a Thousand Mathematicians Gathered in Göttingen Give Standing Ovation]