“Thank you.”
Seha bowed politely to Professor Park, who had driven him all the way to Okcheon.
There had been a bit of commotion at the airport, but the national team safely finished their disbanding ceremony and headed to their respective homes.
“You worked hard. Congratulations again on first place. You know there’s no need to pay any attention to what the Chinese side is saying, right?”
As it turned out, it had not been an official objection, but a personal interview given by the Chinese coaching staff.
“No matter how I think about it, the grading of student Yu Seha’s answers to Problems 4 and 5 was far too generous. It is difficult for us to understand how answers like those could receive six points.”
“Considering precedent, answers of that level would normally receive three points. If that had happened, the first-place result might have changed. Of course, it would have gone to China.”
Even the problem committee members had needed a considerable amount of time to understand Seha’s logic. It was not unreasonable for those who had not analyzed the answers deeply to feel dissatisfied.
“Yes, I don’t mind.”
Seha shook his head as if he truly did not care in the slightest. Professor Park found that admirable, yet strange. Unlike most children, Seha did not crave recognition from adults.
“All right. Hurry on inside.”
Vroooom—
Professor Park’s sedan drove off into the distance.
“Ah! Home really is the best.”
Suuup.
Seha took a deep breath.
The scent of ripening rice, the smell of earth drifting from afar. It was the familiar air of Okcheon.
Rattle.
Pulling his suitcase behind him, Seha’s steps quickened as he headed home.
Seha stood in front of the house where he had lived his entire life and paused to catch his breath. It had only been a few days since he had been here, yet it felt as though a long time had passed.
Seha took the case containing the gold medal out of his bag, checked its contents once more, and opened the gate.
“Mom, Dad! I’m back.”
Seoeun, who had been playing with dirt in the flower bed, saw her brother and sprang to her feet.
“Oppa!”
Seoeun ran out from the yard. His little sister, who seemed to have grown a bit more in just a few days, dashed toward Seha with all her might.
Seha set down his bag, crouched, and caught Seoeun in his arms.
The familiar warmth and smell.
Only now did it feel real that he had come home.
“Were you good?”
Seoeun nodded firmly.
“Yeah! I listened to Mom, and I didn’t fight with the kids at kindergarten and got along with them!”
Seoeun looked up at Seha with sparkling eyes, her expression as if she were expecting something.
“Here’s Seoeun’s gold medal.”
When Seha opened the case and showed her the medal, Seoeun’s face bloomed brightly like a flower. Once he hung it around her neck, she ran around the yard as if she were the happiest person in the world. Then she looked in the mirror and, apparently delighted all over again, struck various poses while grinning bashfully.
“I wonder if she even knows what that is, getting so happy about it.”
Miyeong came out of the kitchen with a smile. Wearing an apron and wiping her hands, it seemed she had been cooking because her son was coming home.
“Mom!”
“My son, you worked so hard. It must have been exhausting, right?”
Miyeong pulled Seha into a hug and patted his back.
When the news reported that Seha had taken first place, the entire village had been in an uproar. For the past two days, everyone Miyeong met had envied her for having such an outstanding son.
Seoeun, with the gold medal around her neck, spun round and round in front of her family.
“Oppa! You worked hard and got first place because of me, right?”
Seha thought for a moment, then answered.
“I think that really was the case.”
Seoeun beamed and rejoiced.
“What kind of joke is that... She’ll think it’s true. I’ll set the table soon. I made kimchi stew.”
It was the most welcome news of all.
* * *
“Next news.
At the International Mathematical Olympiad, our national team has achieved second place overall. In particular, Yu Seha, a sixth-grade elementary school student, has become a hot topic by taking first place individually at the age of twelve, the youngest in history.”
The screen showed the IMO awards ceremony. Seha was standing on the podium, receiving his gold medal.
“This Olympiad is being evaluated as the most difficult in history, alongside the one in 1988. We have invited an expert to the studio. Professor Nam Taejin? Have you reviewed the exam problems?”
The screen changed.
A middle-aged mathematics professor wearing glasses sat holding some documents.
“Yes, I have. To be honest, I was shocked. In particular, Problem 6 was an extremely difficult problem, the sort one might deal with in a doctoral program in graduate school. It is not so much that it requires a great deal of knowledge, but that the thought process needed to reach the conclusion is exceedingly complex.”
“Was it that difficult?”
“In fact, Yu Seha was the only student in this competition who solved Problem 6. And more than six hundred gifted students from all over the world participated.”
“Then how would you evaluate Yu Seha’s ability?”
“Haha! I’m sure viewers want an intuitive answer, but mathematics is not a field where one can assign ranks as neatly as in a game. However, I can say this: he is an exceptionally outstanding student.
After Elijah Cronen, there has been no student of this age who has achieved such mathematical accomplishments.”
As soon as the news ended, the internet began to stir.
└A new gallery lord has been born.
└What? Is that supposed to be amazing?
└You need to know math to know what to praise.
└I’m in a number theory PhD program. I got the PDF for Problem 6 and looked at it, and it was honestly horrifying. This could be used as the topic for a research paper. I think this kid really is a genius.
└Can I see the problem too?
└What would you understand even if you saw it? lol
└Hello, I’m a resident of Okcheon. I saw today that a kid from our neighborhood was on the news. He’s always been polite and smiles a lot, and there have been rumors since he was little that he was a prodigy.
└The kid looks neat and handsome. If they raise him well, maybe?
└But it seems like there’s some talk coming out of China? They’re making a fuss, saying first place was stolen.
└Those people think everything belongs to them anyway.
└No joke, they’re going around to famous mathematicians’ social media accounts and posting the problems and answer sheets. Asking if this is right.
* * *
Professor Cronen’s office, located at the far end of the thirteenth floor of a Princeton University research building, was a place that spawned all sorts of ghost stories.
Among undergraduates, it was called “the curse of the thirteenth floor.”
In fact, over the past ten years, more than half of the graduate students who had entered Professor Cronen’s tutelage had dropped out midway, and some among them had required psychiatric treatment for severe depression.
Every year during freshman orientation, upperclassmen would gather the juniors and secretly warn them about Professor Cronen.
“If Professor Elijah Cronen takes an interest in you, run away immediately. Don’t even look back.”
However, the public reputation of the professor himself was completely different.
In the world of mathematics, the name Elijah Cronen inspired awe and admiration.
He had changed the landscape of academia by single-handedly breaking through a difficult problem in combinatorics that had remained unsolved for the past fifty years.
The new methodology he developed had a major influence on graph theory and probabilistic combinatorics, and it had now become an essential technique throughout mathematics.
There was a reason countless graduate students knocked on this door despite knowing the ghost stories.
Among the students Cronen had advised, half had failed to complete their degrees, but the other half had become full professors at the world’s leading universities or recipients of prestigious awards such as the Fields Medal, the Gödel Prize, and the Abel Prize.
It was truly the front line of modern mathematics. And so, while the thirteenth floor was a symbol of terror, it was also a sacred site of the mathematical world, a place every student of mathematics wanted to set foot in at least once.
Tap, tap, tap.
“Mm?”
Professor Cronen’s eyes narrowed as he was about to open his email in his office.
“Professor, have you seen Twitter?”
One of his assistants came rushing over with a laptop.
“What on earth is all this?”
His account, which normally no one except mathematicians ever visited, now had thousands of mentions attached to it.
“It’s probably the Chinese. There’s a Korean student who took first place at the IMO, and they’re claiming his score is abnormally high.”
With an awkward expression, the assistant opened the laptop screen and showed it to him. The professor’s account was covered entirely in angry Chinese comments.
“Why are they bringing that to me? Do they think I’m on the IMO problem committee?”
“It seems they’ve gone to other mathematicians as well. But since you’re the most well-known, Professor...”
The corner of Cronen’s mouth twitched.
“Is that so? If it’s a math problem, of all things, then I suppose I should solve it for them. Bring me the problems and the answers.”
“Yes! Understood.”
After the assistant left, Cronen glanced around, then accessed his own homepage.
Normally, even when he wrote a blog post, fewer than one thousand people read it. And all of them were figures in the mathematical world.
No matter how famous one was, the general public had no interest in mathematicians.
[Visitors today: 15,244]
His blog had shot up in popularity.
The assistant brought the printed problems and answers.
With a solemn expression, Cronen accepted them and began reading.
As he examined the problems, his eyes flew open. Then he looked up who had written them.
“Ah! It’s this old man.”
Now he understood. If it was this old fellow, he was more than capable of setting a problem like this.
Problem 6, which had cleverly intertwined number theory and algebra, was astonishingly similar to a research topic he had wrestled with during his master’s program.
“A twelve-year-old solved this?”
Cronen read Seha’s answer.
“Oho...”
From the first page, his expression turned serious.
Prime number theory, harmonic series, and quadratic residues had been woven together without any logical leaps.
“Mm?”
When he turned to the second page, Elijah’s eyes widened.
“He found this right away?”
Seha advanced precisely toward the core, as if he had known the answer in advance. While most people would have clung to dummy calculations, this child had grasped the essence of the problem at once. Then he ran down the clearest path and reached the solution.
“This is almost...”
Like me?
Cronen felt a strange sense of kinship with this boy.
He found the hidden links among various conditions that, on the surface, appeared to have no relation at all. And he completed the proof in the most beautiful way.
Elijah Cronen, who had conquered the IMO at thirteen.
And now, as a master who had devoted more than thirty years afterward to mathematics, he could see through to the powerful mathematical intuition this boy displayed.
‘He was born with it.’
Some people said mathematicians were made through training, but that was something said by those who did not know reality.
Every mathematician runs into a wall. What is needed to break through it is talent.
That was why Cronen did not properly acknowledge mathematicians who had not been born with it.
All the ghost stories of the thirteenth floor had arisen for that reason.
He read the answers to Problems 4 and 5, the ones that had become controversial.
And then he laughed loudly.
“Hahahaha!”
This impertinent little brat had utterly ignored the existing curriculum and written his answers in a language only mathematicians could understand.
Highly compressed expressions, the sort one might see only in a personal research paper.
It was like an outstanding architect had put up only the framework without any finishing work.
Tap, tap, tap.
Cronen wrote a post on his blog.
[To those who think this boy does not deserve first place.]
—If you are a mathematician, I suggest you look for another profession. Even if you are an ordinary person with no connection to mathematics, you would do well to remember the name Yu Seha.
It’s a problem that the IMO gave him six points?
If it were me, I would have given him full marks.
—Elijah Cronen.
At the unrestrained words of a giant of the mathematical world, the related communities exploded.