“Why is our Seoeun so cross?”
Five-year-old Seoeun stood with her arms folded, stubbornly staring up at the sky to the left.
Miyeong tried speaking to her gently to soothe her, but Seoeun only puffed out her cheeks even more and turned her head away entirely.
“My pretty Seoeun, why don’t you whisper it just to Mommy? What happened?”
Standing on her short legs with her lips stuck out in a pout, she looked as though she were shouting to the world with her whole body that she was angry.
Miyeong laughed, finding the sight adorable.
“Seoeun, what’s wrong?”
Seoeun began to sniffle as though the whole world had wronged her.
“Oppa!”
“Yes, your oppa.”
Sniff.
“Oppa hasn’t played with me for two whole days. He said he’d play with me after the competition ended, but he lied to me.”
Tears fell drop by drop from Seoeun’s eyes.
“It’s because we have a guest right now. He’ll be leaving soon, so let’s wait just a little longer.”
Richmond? Edward?
A man who was supposedly a famous professor had come to visit early and was talking with Seoh a. After experiencing things like this several times, Miyeong had become immune to them and no longer felt as nervous as before.
‘Seoha will handle it.’
“Then, can Mommy play instead? I’ll teach you.”
Miyeong sighed.
She had a lot to do, but it seemed her daughter was not going to let her go so easily.
“All right! Let’s play together!”
“Okay!”
Seoeun dashed into the room. Then she came back out carrying a basket. Inside were colorful number cards made by Seoh a. Miyeong had seen the children playing with them, but she did not know the rules of the game.
The cards were divided into two types: large numbers and small numbers.
“If you put down one of these, I use these cards to break it apart. The more cards I use, the better!”
The card she had been dealt was a large number.
Miyeong picked out a card marked 90 and held it out.
“Ninety? Then I’ll…”
Seoeun rummaged through her cards with her small hands and muttered to herself.
“Hmm… First, 2! Then 45 is left, and next… 3! Now 15 is left, so 3 and 5!”
Excited, Seoeun picked up the cards one by one and set them down.
“Ta-da! I used four cards!”
She clapped, delighted. Then she held out her hand.
“Candy!”
Miyeong stared at her daughter with a look of utter bewilderment.
‘This is a number game? Son, what on earth are you teaching your little sister?’
Miyeong placed a piece of candy in Seoeun’s hand.
“Now it’s Mommy’s turn! A bigger number!”
The couple had never taught Seoeun anything.
But Seoh a had begun carrying his little sister around every day, and one day he started reading books to her. Then came lessons in Hangul. Learning numbers, the alphabet, and even multiplication tables had not taken very long.
‘I never imagined he was making her do prime factorization, though.’
Seoeun seemed simply happy to play with her oppa.
She did not recognize it as studying at all.
Miyeong was human too, so she had not entirely lacked the thought, ‘Could Seoeun be like him as well?’ But her daughter was different from Seoh a.
Her son handled everything on his own. The thirst for knowledge that Seoh a had shown as he searched for books and read them was nowhere to be seen in Seoeun. But that did not matter. She was growing up bright and healthy.
Cheolho was a little hurt that his daughter had made her oppa her favorite person in the world, but…
“Pfft.”
Thinking of her husband, now sulking after being pushed down to third place in his own daughter’s affections, made her laugh.
* * *
“Is your conversation over?”
Only after quite some time did the professor come outside. He looked at Miyeong with a face full of things he wanted to say, as though he had just finished a very important conversation with Seoh a, but merely bowed politely before leaving.
“Yes. He’s a professor at some university in the United States, and he asked me to publish a paper.”
“A paper? Isn’t that difficult?”
“Not at all. He said I just need to organize and write up the problems I solved. He even said he would submit it for me.”
Miyeong still could not understand.
Weren’t papers something university students wrote? Even when she tried to grow accustomed to her brilliant son, Seoh a surpassed her imagination every time.
“But why a paper all of a sudden?”
“He probably just brought it up while he was here to give me this.”
As though he had only just remembered, Seoh a pulled a box out from behind him. It was fairly large, and the sender was listed as the Korean Mathematical Society.
“Oh? What’s this? It’s quite big.”
Miyeong took the box and was surprised by its weight.
Curious, she fetched a box cutter and carefully opened it. Inside was an item surrounded by packing material.
“Is it a book?”
When she opened the case, which had been made to unfold like a book, a certificate printed with gold lettering appeared.
[49th National Mathematics Competition Grand Prize]
“They really went all out making this.”
Miyeong examined the certificate in admiration. It was made of thick paper with gold foil embellishments.
[Name: Yu Seoh a]
Her heart swelled at the thought that her son had been recognized at a national competition. Before she knew it, Seoeun had come over and was rummaging through the box she had set down, like a cat.
“Mommy, a plate!”
It was a silver, plate-shaped trophy.
Miyeong looked back and forth between the certificate and the trophy, her face filled with emotion. She was wondering where to put them so everyone could see them when she noticed that Seoh a did not seem interested in them at all.
“Eeeeeek!”
Seoeun was delighted.
Apparently taken with the shiny object, she clutched the plate tightly with both hands as though it were hers. Miyeong picked her up and played airplane with her, flying her “up, up, up.”
As Miyeong went to put the box away, some documents fell out onto the floor.
[Prize Money Collection Information]
—Prize money: 1,000,000 won
“There’s prize money too? And this much?”
A million won would be a great help in their tight household budget, but Miyeong could not bring herself to consider spending it.
‘I should save it for Seoh a. You never know what might happen in the future…’
It was the day the name Yu Seoh a began to spread throughout the nation.
* * *
The faculty office of a gifted high school in Sejong,
Sujeong stood blankly, holding a certificate. The paper in her hand trembled slightly.
[49th National Mathematics Competition Gold Prize]
“Gold prize? Me?”
Disbelief filled Sujeong’s voice. This had never happened to her in her entire life. She had always been first place. In every exam and every competition.
“Yes. It was unfortunate this time.”
Her homeroom teacher, Park Yeongho, a mathematics teacher, shook his head.
“Sir, isn’t this a mistake? I don’t make mistakes. I knew every single problem, and I wrote out the solutions and answers perfectly. If I got a perfect score, how could I not receive the grand prize?”
“Ergh.”
Her homeroom teacher looked troubled.
He, too, had never doubted that Sujeong would win the grand prize, so he had immediately called the organizers to verify the result.
“There was a small error in Problem 4. Apparently, the student who received the grand prize corrected it perfectly. It became a major topic among the professors. Actually, they were going to accept multiple answers, but a professor from Stanford objected.”
Edward Han.
When Yeongho heard that name, he got goosebumps. Why would a world-renowned mathematician come all the way to a Korean competition?
Back in university, Yeongho himself had spent several sleepless nights trying to understand one of the professor’s papers.
The paper he had published at the age of thirty-four, “An Approach to the Regularity Problem for the Navier–Stokes Equations,” had sent shock waves through the mathematical world. It had proposed an innovative methodology for one of the central challenges in fluid mechanics.
Since then, he had published more than thirty papers in numerous top journals and boasted a world-class citation count.
If this man had personally selected the grand prize winner, the society could do nothing about it.
Yeongho explained the situation as earnestly as he could, but from Sujeong’s perspective, it was difficult to accept.
“I don’t know what I did wrong. If my answer had been incorrect, I could study hard and get it right next time. But it wasn’t wrong. Sir, what do I have to do to come in first? Do I have to wait until the person who won the grand prize goes to college?”
‘Why is she so desperate?’
Only then did Yeongho realize that the student before him was merely fifteen years old.
He had been so blinded by her outstanding mathematical achievements that he had failed to see the student herself.
“Sujeong.”
“Yes?”
“Do your parents put a lot of pressure on you over your grades?”
Yeongho asked cautiously.
According to the information recorded in her student file, Sujeong’s father was an engineering professor at Seoul National University, and her mother was a doctor. In his experience, families like that often placed considerable academic pressure on their children.
Perhaps this girl was being forced to study to the point of abuse.
But the answer he received was entirely different from what he had expected.
“What? What do you mean? My parents have been begging me to cut back on my cram schools since I was little. My dad especially pesters me every weekend to skip academy and go out with him. Do you know how hard it was to shake him off?”
Sujeong looked at Yeongho as though he were the strange one.
“Pardon?”
“What?”
“But why are you so obsessed with your ranking? A gold prize is an excellent result.”
“I like being first. The feeling of standing alone at the very top. That moment when everyone else looks up at me is truly…”
Her eyes sparkled. Could this be what an addict looked like when craving drugs?
“…so ecstatic that I can hardly stand it.”
Sujeong closed her eyes and crossed her hands over her chest as though embracing herself. Then she shuddered violently.
Rustle.
Goosebumps rose along Yeongho’s arms.
“S-Sujeong.”
‘She’s not normal. A mental disorder? But she seems perfectly fine ordinarily. Her mother’s a doctor—what on earth do they do at home?’
Various thoughts crossed Yeongho’s mind.
He was just beginning to edge away when Sujeong suddenly opened her eyes wide and leaned forward.
Yeongho flinched at the inexplicable force radiating from her.
“Sir, that’s why I’m asking. The grand prize winner is a high school senior, right? They’re graduating this year, aren’t they? Then I’ll be first again starting next year, so I suppose there’s no need to worry too much.
Actually, it wouldn’t matter even if they weren’t graduating. I was just unlucky this time. Who could have known that professor from the United States would make such an unreasonable argument? Still, I’d like to check, just to be safe. What was the name?”
“Yu Seoh a.”
“I know the names of the top twenty mathematicians in our country by heart, but I’ve never heard that one before. I guess that person just had an incredible stroke of luck this time.”
He had never realized because she was usually so quiet. He had not known the girl was this talkative.
Now he had an idea why.
She must have been quietly savoring all the praise showered upon her.
As Sujeong’s words poured forth without pause, Yeongho’s mind grew hazy. He decided to bring the conversation to an end as quickly as possible.
“He’s an elementary school student.”
Sujeong blinked as though her brain had frozen.
“What?”
“Yu Seoh a, the kid who won the grand prize. He’s an elementary school student.
I received his answer sheet and read it myself, but to be honest, I couldn’t understand all of it. I’m sorry for being a teacher with insufficient ability.”
It was a sincere apology, but Sujeong’s eyes remained unfocused, as though she could not hear a thing.
“…That’s impossible.”
A tremendous crisis had descended upon fifteen-year-old Sujeong’s life.