Reporter Nam Gi-sun entered his hotel room and opened his laptop.
The deadline was tomorrow morning; he had plenty of time. He brewed a strong cup of coffee, took a sip, then placed his hands on the keyboard.
Blink, blink.
The cursor blinked on the white word processor screen.
What title should he give it?
Korean Mathematical Genius Yu Seoha Solves Mathematics’ Greatest Unsolved Problem?
The Riemann Hypothesis, Conquered at Last?
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
He jabbed harshly at the backspace key and erased the words.
Leaning back in his chair, he stared up at the ceiling. The fluorescent light buzzed. The particular atmosphere of an old hotel—he shook his head violently.
“Think, Nam Gi-sun. This isn’t it!”
Dry, formulaic sentences like that could not capture even a tenth of the overwhelming scene he had witnessed. When he closed his eyes, the events of the afternoon still came back to him vividly.
“It was an unbelievably magnificent sight.”
The proud geniuses who commanded the world parted like the Red Sea, opening a path, then quietly bowed their heads toward the boy who had collapsed from exhaustion.
As a science journalist, he knew something of how academia worked.
That miraculous moment when mathematicians, usually so busy tearing into one another’s logic and criticizing each other, rose to their feet in a standing ovation with tears streaming down their faces. And even the fierce anger those mathematicians had unleashed at the reporter who had dared ask an impertinent question.
Tap, tap.
At last, Gi-sun’s fingers began to strike the keys.
Heh.
He had it. This was the title.
The corners of his mouth rose.
Tap-tap-tap.
He began writing the body of the article at once.
As he wrote, Gi-sun’s heart grew hot again. As a reporter, he had to convey objective facts and tried to exclude emotion as much as possible, but on the other hand, he wanted to share with his readers the overwhelming awe and thrill he had felt at that moment.
After writing for a long while, he suddenly stopped and looked out the window.
Göttingen University lay under a deep darkness. Even at this hour, the sleepless intellects there would be waging a fierce war inside their tents, trying to interpret the theory the boy had left behind.
Would the readers truly understand? How absurdly unbelievable this was?
“What kind of monster came out of Korea?”
In his years as a journalist, he had seen the base nature of human beings countless times. More than once, he had felt disillusioned with people. He had never imagined that he himself would come to write an article filled with such pure praise.
The next morning, an article of a quality incomparable to news pieces rewritten from foreign reports was posted on the front page of the portal.
[O Crown Prince of Mathematics, Receive Our Homage.]
While the internet was being plastered with translated foreign articles along the lines of, “Yu Seoha of MIT has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. If the proof is accepted, he will receive a prize of one million dollars,” his article conveyed an entirely different level of immediacy.
It was so immersive that readers felt as if they had seen the scene themselves. From his writing came the acrid air and smell of chalk from a lecture hall hundreds of years old.
「......The oak doors of the auditorium opened, and he entered. Why did everyone feel solemn at the sight of Seoha? Perhaps because they saw in him the image of a seeker, one who desired only truth.
Andrew Wiles, who stands at the pinnacle of the mathematical world; countless winners of the three great prizes; and tenured professors from the world’s highest-level universities. These people, who must have lived their whole lives aloof and proud, welcomed Seoha in wrinkled shirts, unable to wash for days.
The previous night, too, they had pitched tents on the lawn beneath the cold dew.
For what?
Because they did not want to miss even a single line of the equations that young seeker wrote on the blackboard.」
The article arranged three photographs from the scene with exquisite timing.
He had entered the lecture hall with the KAIST faculty under the condition that no photography was allowed, but he could not simply sit on his hands. With a miniature camera for undercover reporting, he had secretly captured the scene. The photos were low resolution and even out of focus, but that only enhanced the sense of realism.
The first photograph showed Seoha agonizing in front of the enormous blackboard, chalk in hand.
The second showed elderly scholars engaged in heated debate on the Göttingen campus, where tents of every color had been set up.
And the last showed nearly a thousand masters placing their hands over their hearts and bowing in unison toward Seoha, who was being carried out on someone’s back after completing every proof, utterly drained.
「Mathematics is a merciless discipline. A single counterexample can send a lifetime’s achievement into the trash. That is why these people never believe another’s theory easily.
But that moment was an exception. The verification had not even begun, yet one professor, an authority in cryptography, told me that everyone had recognized it at first glance. That its beautiful structure was order itself, forged by the universe.
Throughout the writing of this article, I struggled to choose my words. In an age when the word “genius” is overused, it feels far too light for him. The word “great” feels somewhat grandiose for one still so young.
People commonly call Carl Friedrich Gauss the King of Mathematics. Therefore, I shall call Yu Seoha this.
O Crown Prince of Mathematics, descended upon this era, please receive our homage!」
Within two hours of being uploaded, the article surpassed one million views. However, part of the public reaction was not particularly favorable toward Seoha.
└I acknowledge that he won the Fields Medal. And yeah, it’s an insanely incredible achievement. But how much does this reporter even know about math to make such a fuss? It’ll take years just to verify it, and he’s calling him a crown prince?
└I know more than ten people myself. Who? People who announced they’d proved the Riemann Hypothesis. I get being hyped, but let’s keep it reasonable, reporter.
The Riemann Hypothesis was the graveyard of mathematicians.
Not long ago, the great scholar Michael Atiyah, who had won both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, announced that he had proved the Riemann Hypothesis, only to exit bitterly. The media had made a fuss then as well and ended up losing face.
The public had grown sick of the recurring pattern of “The Riemann Hypothesis Has Been Conquered!” articles appearing periodically, only to be withdrawn a few months later.
└I’m in a math PhD program, and I’d bet about one month’s salary that an article saying “Fatal Error Discovered” will come out around next year.
└A grad student’s salary? So you’re saying you’re not betting anything? lololol
But as people connected to the mathematics world began appearing, the mood started to change.
└The armchair mathematicians are out in force again lol. Did you even read the article? It says the place is crawling with veterans like Andrew Wiles. You think those old men are idiots, camping out on the lawn?
└I’m a math postdoc. The atmosphere is a little different this time. My advisor is incredibly strict, and he still hasn’t come back from Germany.
└I’m in Göttingen right now lolololol. You’re saying that because you don’t know what the situation is like here. The monster-level professors are already treating the Riemann Hypothesis as solved fact.
└Yeah, if not, there’s no way the named mathematicians would react like that. I heard MIT is in an uproar too? According to an exchange student, it’s already a festival over there.
└Is something... something huge happening? My heart’s pounding.
Even members of the public who had never had any interest in mathematics joined in, and heated arguments broke out. Skepticism that the article was exaggerated nationalistic hype clashed evenly with defenders insisting that this time it was real.
Criticism, mockery, and praise mingled as the online world burned hot. And Reporter Nam’s article was translated into multiple languages, eventually taking over overseas communities as well.
└Tsk, tsk! They say a prophet is not honored in his own country, and indeed, you lack faith. Naturalize, Yu Seoha!
└Exactly. If they knew even a little about Seoha, they’d know he’s never once made a false claim. The math department kids are probably already busy teabagging Harvard lololol
***
A week had passed since the day Seoha completed the proof.
“Surely they didn’t erase the blackboard, did they?”
Professors who had just arrived in Göttingen cried out as they came rushing breathlessly toward the lecture hall.
The proof was over, but the number of people in the tent village in front of the auditorium had not decreased in the slightest. That was because the number of new arrivals overwhelmingly exceeded the number of people leaving.
Taxis coming from the airport disgorged mathematicians one after another in front of the campus.
“Do not worry. The university has put up special glass partitions around the blackboard.”
A postdoctoral researcher who had arrived earlier said it with an air of superiority, as if wondering how they could not know even that.
Ordinarily, when a proof of a century-class problem was published, it took years just to verify it. Fermat’s Last Theorem had been like that, and so had the Poincaré Conjecture.
Experts in each field scattered across the world would put their heads together and search for holes in the logic. If questions arose, they would send letters to the author of the paper or to experts in the relevant field, demand answers, then review them again—a tedious game of ping-pong.
Moreover, Seoha’s proof was a theory that fused all kinds of difficult fields of modern mathematics into one: number theory, topology, analysis, geometry, quantum mechanics, and more.
“Wow! It’ll take ages just to understand this completely. How long will the verification take?”
“Even so, we do not need to wait for emails here, do we?”
The reason the scholars could not leave.
At present, more than a thousand of the greatest authorities in various fields, including winners of the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize, and the Wolf Prize, were gathered in Göttingen.
If a question arose, one could simply grab hold of the trouser leg of the great scholar in the next tent and ask. It was truly an environment one could only have imagined in a dream.
President Brenner, watching this from the rooftop of the main building, gripped the railing tightly.
Beneath his white hair fluttering in the wind, his eyes were reddened. The essence of human intellect had gathered and was boiling like a vast furnace. He had never thought he would live to see such a sight.
“Are you watching? Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert.”
He wiped away the tears gathered at the corners of his wrinkled eyes and looked up at the sky. Overwhelming emotion surged over him like a tidal wave.
“The center of world mathematics has finally returned to Göttingen.”
A young mathematician from a distant foreign land had followed the traces Riemann left behind.
Chasing the light he emitted, geniuses from all over the world had come once again to this old university. Brenner shuddered at the sight of Göttingen’s heart, which had stopped for a full century, beating powerfully once more.
He picked up his phone and instructed his secretary.
“Please make sure that Seoha and Team Apex experience no inconvenience during their stay. See to it that they can remain here as long as possible.”
***
A hotel in downtown Göttingen.
After a week, Seoha had fully recovered his strength.
Having slept deeply and woken, his face was full of curiosity and vitality. Ducky, too, had filled its terrible hunger and was now peacefully asleep.
“Shall we start heading out?”
“What about organizing the paper?”
Theo asked.
Countless scholars who had not been able to come here were waiting for Seoha’s paper.
“That’s just a matter of typing it up anyway. More than that, I’m curious how they’re dissecting my geometry. If there are parts they’re stuck on, I want to help.”
As soon as Seoha appeared on campus, the scholars all grabbed their pens and flocked toward him.
“Seoha! In Lemma 4, how did you handle the curvature of this space?”
“Is this the correct spectral convergence condition in a noncommutative space?”
Questions poured in from every direction.
Seoha’s eyes sparkled as he plunged into their midst. Marker in hand, he moved freely here and there, explaining the structure of the space he had created. Team Apex also engaged in fierce debate with them alongside Seoha.
And in that process, the mathematicians gathered in Göttingen came to have a mysterious experience.
“...Huh?”
A professor from Oxford who specialized in partial differential equations let out an exclamation as he looked at the whiteboard.
He was not an expert on the Riemann Hypothesis. He had merely been watching because he found the new geometric tool used in Seoha’s proof fascinating. But then—
“Um, Seoha. That resonance condition of the operator just now. Does it still hold if applied to this equation?”
Seoha nodded as if it were obvious.
“Of course. This space isn’t limited only to integers. If you substitute the Hamiltonian operator with a wave function...... Hmm, at this part, the energy won’t diverge but will be tied into a bundle.”
“My God...”
The professor pulled out his notebook with trembling hands and began frantically writing equations. A problem that had tormented him for five whole years melted like soft butter when it encountered the new geometry Seoha had created.
Seoha’s geometric world was not a custom-made key solely for finding the zeros of the Riemann zeta function. As its range expanded into domains modern mathematics had not been able to encompass, breakthroughs occurred in various fields that had been blocked until then.
“M-me too!”
“Would you take a look over here as well?”
Columbus’s egg.
Until someone opened the way, it was something no one could ever imagine. But once geniuses realized that the path existed, Seoha’s theory was, quite literally, a treasure trove of endless possibilities.
“This is a total gold mine, isn’t it?”
The words slipped unconsciously from a young postdoc from Korea.
Seoha scratched his head awkwardly amid the surging scholars, but a happy smile rested on his lips. He was simply glad that his mathematics could help someone.
Watching the scene from afar, Andrew and Whitman let out incredulous laughs.
“Shouldn’t MIT open a course next semester? Give it a cool name, too.”
“I suppose we should. It will cause another uproar. An MIT professor in his teens... It’s unprecedented.”
Would he be able to teach students well?
It was a question with no room for choice. The only person in the world who could write the textbook for this subject and lecture on it was Seoha.
The two masters looked at each other and burst into cheerful laughter.