Ding—
Ding—
Smartphone notifications rang out simultaneously all across the MIT campus.
In the dormitories, the library, the cafeteria—even on the banks of the Charles River, where students had been in the middle of dates. The faces of the students who checked the message stiffened for a moment, then flushed with excitement as though about to burst.
[Apex Lab Emergency Assembly]
-Recipients: Refer to list
-Location: Conference Room 3
Even within MIT, these were the prodigies among prodigies. They were also the talents who, while verifying Felix’s paper, had built a deep understanding of the major points surrounding the Riemann hypothesis.
“Hugo! Did you get it too?”
“Of course! Let’s go right now!”
Hugo flung aside the sandwich he had been eating and grabbed Laura’s hand.
The name 512 Death Squad was like a proud medal to them. Pride in standing at the forefront of the new mathematical paradigm led by Seoha. They had even formed their own regular gathering.
Crash, bang—
The door to the conference room opened, and dozens of students poured in with harsh, panting breaths. At the front stood a large board.
After confirming that everyone had gathered, Theo stepped forward. Normally, he would have opened with a light joke, but today his expression was as grave as that of a commander facing wartime conditions.
“As of this moment, MIT and Apex Lab are entering emergency mode.”
Gulp.
The thirty or so students gathered in the conference room swallowed at once.
“It hasn’t been long since the paper was uploaded, and our inbox is already on the verge of collapse. The types of questions vary. Some contain sharp insight, but there are also many from people who don’t even understand the basic axioms of the new geometry.”
Theo looked around at everyone in the conference room.
“Our mission is to build the first line of defense against these questions in Seoha’s place. We have to persuade them using the grammar Seoha created.
But you must remember this. Every email you send, every answer you give, goes out under the name of Apex Lab. That means mathematicians all over the world will be analyzing your responses as if peering at them through a microscope.”
Hugo shot his hand into the air.
“Theo. Could we see the list of questioners?”
“Here.”
Hugo’s hand trembled as he received the tablet.
The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Clay Mathematics Institute, Stanford Graduate School, the Max Planck Institute, École Polytechnique, Peking University… They were among the most renowned mathematical research institutions in the world.
“These people are asking us questions?”
“Many questions have already come in. We can’t afford to lose trust before the theory has even been verified. Once a bad impression is made, it takes a long time to recover. So…”
Theo pointed to the mountain of printouts piled on the table.
“We’ll have to study first, won’t we? If you think this burden is too heavy for you, you may quietly get up and leave.”
A heavy silence settled over the conference room. But not a single person rose from their seat. On the contrary, fighting spirit blazed in their eyes.
Hugo pushed up his glasses and smirked.
“Hahaha! With that face, you even know how to make jokes. This is a chance to stick our spoons into the greatest moment in the history of mathematics. What fool would walk out now?”
Laughter broke out here and there.
Those gathered here had strong confidence in their own abilities. Many were receiving offers from the world’s leading companies and research institutes, and no small number had already won major awards in academia.
But what truly made their hearts race was not their careers or résumés.
It was the event now unfolding at the center of the global mathematical world. The pride of standing in the middle of it stirred a burning passion in their hearts. And the thrill that the authors of papers they had always sought out and studied would now, in turn, be asking them questions also played its part.
“Let’s get started. We can’t keep the elders waiting too long.”
“It wouldn’t be fun without this much pressure. Let’s do this properly!”
Rustle.
Soon, the sound of pages turning filled the conference room.
Some went to the board and picked up markers, while others frantically typed equations into laptops.
Rattle.
Just then, the back door of the conference room opened, and Seoha entered. Dressed comfortably, his eyes were bloodshot as if he had stayed up all night, but his expression looked bright.
“You all came. Thank you so much.”
When Seoha bowed his head, the seniors were the ones who grew flustered and waved their hands.
“We’re a death squad in name, so of course we had to come!”
“Right, right! You go in and write your book. You have to sign a copy for each of us too, okay?”
“Exactly! This is a matter of MIT’s pride as well. We won’t let a single blemish remain on the historic paper written by our junior, so don’t worry!”
Something hot surged up in his chest.
The vast door he had flung open. These people were willing to stand before it, be covered in dust, and become a bridge to the world. Without any compensation, driven only by pure academic passion and a sense of mission.
Seoha clenched his fist tightly.
‘Let’s make the clearest map.’
So that everyone could fully enjoy that vast, dazzling universe he had seen.
He resolved to draw it in a language everyone could understand, without the slightest error.
* * *
The outskirts of Munich, Germany.
While theoretical mathematicians were wrestling with Seoha’s paper, those in applied mathematics and computer science were moving more swiftly.
Machines hummed low inside a massive cube-shaped building.
LRZ, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, a colossal facility boasting Europe’s finest computational power. A group of scientists had gathered there.
“We’re ready.”
After staying up for several nights, they had converted the equations for the operator Seoha had presented into code that a computer could understand.
“Run it.”
At the director’s command, LRZ’s formidable computational resources began racing toward a single point.
Whirr—
Data poured endlessly across the screen.
The trillionth zero, the ten-trillionth zero…
Calculations that would have taken more than months using Felix’s method began stretching forward at an unbelievable speed once they passed through the new equation devised by Seoha.
“My God.”
“So this is the true power of the operator.”
The researchers watching the monitors gaped.
“Match rate, one hundred percent!”
“Error rate is zero as well.”
“It’s this fast, and not a single zero deviates from the critical line. This is almost…”
The lead researcher muttered with a blank expression.
“As if someone copied the very code God used when creating the universe.”
The director bit down on his lip.
“We have a serious problem. Quantum-resistant cryptography probably isn’t ready yet.”
LRZ wanted to conceal the experimental results, but not everything went according to their wishes. Experiments of a similar nature, though different in scale, were being conducted all over the world.
Not only flawless logic but even physical simulations supported it.
The news completely extinguished even the tiniest embers of doubt remaining in the hearts of the mathematical community. Rather than verifying the paper, they threw themselves into dissecting it with all their might in order to understand its principles. The Riemann hypothesis was now ready to shed the label of “hypothesis” and ascend to the ranks of an eternal and immutable “theorem.”
* * *
A shabby house on the outskirts of Boston.
Mikhail Orsen lay on an old bed, breathing roughly. Cancer cells had already devoured his body, leaving him in a state where even moving a fingertip was difficult. All he could do was gaze out the window and wait for the final day allowed to him to arrive.
“Cough, cough!”
Every time he coughed, pain like his chest being torn apart came over him.
The relationship between quantum chaos and the Riemann zeta function, which he had studied his entire life, had been rejected time and again with evaluations such as “irreproducible” and “lacking evidence.” He thought it was a death befitting a life thoroughly ignored as an outsider in academia.
‘I shouldn’t have given him the box.’
Had he passed along his miserable fate together with the box to a boy whose future was destined to shine?
‘Please, let me live only until I can see that boy’s growth.’
Perhaps it was thanks to that earnest prayer.
He had tenaciously continued breathing at death’s door. Curious about what had become of the boy, he had looked up news from academia for several years, but these days, when even moving was difficult, that too had become impossible. Orsen sensed that little of his life remained.
Clunk!
A heavy sound came from the mailbox.
Normally, he would have ignored it. But that day, he had a strange premonition. Using all his strength, he crawled across the floor toward the entrance. What lay before the door was a thick package. The sender was Yu Seoha.
Rip—
With trembling hands, he carefully tore open the wrapping.
Inside was a heavy, four-hundred-page paper.
“On the Geometric Structure of Prime Numbers and the Zeros of the Zeta Function”
There was no special letter or note.
On ordinary days, he had difficulty even reading the newspaper, so where had this strength come from? He adjusted his magnifying glasses and began reading through the paper.
The sun set, and night came. He even forgot the pain that had been gnawing away at his body.
“Remarkable.”
Seoha’s proof was a marvel in and of itself.
He had expanded the integers into a space of noncommutative geometry and transplanted onto it the dynamic laws of quantum mechanics. The phenomenon Orsen had devoted his entire life to pursuing but had ultimately failed to prove. At the fleeting instant of quantum annihilation, the waves of the zeta function meshed perfectly within his equations.
“What I saw was not a delusion.”
It was dazzling.
The order of the universe he had longed so desperately to find seemed to pulse within those equations.
He quietly closed his eyes.
His life had not been a failure. The footprints he had left while groping through the darkness had become a fine stepping-stone on the path by which the genius named Seoha advanced toward truth. That alone made it a life of value.
Rustle.
Just as he was about to close the paper in satisfaction, the words written on the final page caught his eye.
[References]
It should have been a page listing hundreds of illustrious names and excellent papers. Orsen doubted his own eyes. For on the very first line of that shining list was a name far too familiar to him.
1. Mikhail Orsen.
-Statistical Correlation Between Quantum Chaotic Systems and the Zeros of the Zeta Function (Unpublished)
“Ah…”
A sigh like the groan of a beast escaped his lips. His poor manuscript, which had never even been published and had only gathered dust inside a box, was proudly placed as the first reference in this great paper that had rewritten the history of human mathematics.
With trembling hands, he stroked his own name. Beneath it was a short dedication from Seoha.
“To Professor Orsen, who was the first to hear the waves of the universe in the darkness. The signpost you left behind became a great strength to me. With deep respect and gratitude.”
Drop, drip.
Large tears poured from the old scholar’s eyes, which he had thought had long since dried up.
A lonely life in which he had walked the right path, yet no one had recognized him. But the short words the boy had left behind fully repaid all that injustice and sorrow.
Orsen carefully embraced the paper with his gaunt arms. The burning pain in his body had vanished without a trace, and an indescribable peace and fullness filled him from head to toe.
“It is enough.”
Chirp, chirp!
Warm sunlight shone through the window.
For the first time in decades, Orsen smiled with the innocent expression of a child.
He was not the least bit afraid of the death that would come. For his scholarship would live and breathe forever within that shining boy’s proof.