Translator: Dreamscribe
Alex had known from a very young age that he was different from everyone else.
He had been playing chess against adults since he was six, and after entering elentary school, he never lost a single ga.
He was the California junior chess champion and a regular winner of national math competitions. But the anecdote people rembered most about him was sothing else entirely.
It happened the day Alex took the SAT at sixteen.
'Huh?'
His pen stopped mid-problem during the math section.
The conditions didn't add up. It was obvious what answer the test makers had intended, but it was clearly wrong.
Scratch.
After a mont's hesitation, Alex decided to humor the exam committee.
As soon as the test was over, he called the administering organization to report the error in the problem.
But the response he received was unexpected.
"The question in question was properly administered, and even if there were an issue, there would be no disadvantage to the test-taker."
That was when Alex realized.
He had chosen the intended answer, and that was a kind of compromise. If he had ant to protest, he should have left it blank.
[16-Year-Old Student Discovers Error in SAT Question.]
When he later saw his story in the newspaper, he was stunned.
The exam committee had admitted the error, just in case it caused problems down the line. The question was voided, and Alex ended up losing points as a result.
'Would it have been better to just stay quiet?'
Alex ca to understand the rules of this world.
'Doing the right thing doesn't always bring reward.'
From that day on, he changed the standard by which he governed his actions.
He stopped weighing right and wrong, and began weighing efficiency and reward instead.
The incident was widely covered in major newspapers.
And the na Alex Howard, tagged with the label of math genius, spread across the country in an instant. His enrollnt in Stanford's mathematics departnt was a natural next step.
No one doubted it.
He would write papers, contend for the Fields Prize, and one day beco a luminary who would bring glory to Arica.
Alex loved mathematics.
The clean structure, free of excess. The elegance that remained when unnecessary assumptions were stripped away one by one. The thrill of the mont when conditions scattered across multiple paths converged into a single proposition.
Alex found peace in that process.
He quickly rose to prominence in the mathematics world.
The Analysis and Algebra courses that first-years took were far too easy for him. Before he had even reached his second year, he had his na on a major paper as a co-author while still an undergraduate, and the papers he had written solo also received favorable reviews in the academic community.
'A talent destined to lead the world of mathematics in the future.'
But despite the public's assessnt, a question lingered in his mind that he could not shake.
'Mathematics built all the foundations, so why does engineering always take the money?'
Banners emblazoned with corporate logos hung endlessly across the engineering building. The math departnt, by contrast, was always quiet.
The research funding itself was embarrassingly small by comparison.
Theories that mathematicians had spent decades building were taken by engineers and turned into patents, turned into products.
'We're practically miners, aren't we?'
Mathematicians go deep underground, taking risks to dig out raw ore.
But it was other people who refined it, sold it, and built their wealth. Mathematics was beautiful, but when it ca to the efficiency and reward he valued, there was no discipline more inefficient.
"This system is unfair."
No, unfair was hardly strong enough a word. It deserved to be called exploitation. This absurd relationship between mathematics and engineering.
His decision was swift and decisive.
He gave up on pursuing a doctorate and began taking engineering and business school courses in parallel. In doing so, he developed an ability that other students did not possess.
He naturally learned how to package mathematical insight into a marketable product.
Arc Wave.
The consulting firm he founded quickly established itself in the industry.
With his characteristically brilliant mathematical thinking, he solved chronic problems for companies ti and again.
When dealing with corporations, the questions Alex valued were always the sa.
-What is the objective of this system?
-How do you asure success?
The event that made Arc Wave widely known in the industry was a project for a global logistics company.
The project had a grandiose na.
Next-Generation Enterprise-Wide Logistics Optimization System.
The plan was to unify hundreds of warehouses, thousands of vehicles, real-ti demand forecasting, and route optimization under a single AI. An internal engineering team and external engineering consultants had already been brought in, and the budget alone exceeded 200 million dollars.
The problem was that no results were being produced whatsoever.
The model had been completed, but it kept causing errors in the field.
There were improvents in simulation, but actual operations saw increased delays instead. When asked about the cause of failure, the engineers always repeated the sa thing.
"We still don't have enough data."
"We just need a little more training."
That was when one of the board mbers brought in Alex, whose na had just begun to circulate in the industry.
At the first eting, he asked a single question.
"What is the objective?"
The engineers' answers were a spectacle.
Maximize revenue, minimize inventory, reduce delivery tis, cut logistics costs.
'Unbelievable.'
Alex shook his head.
Engineers were always like this. They set mathematically impossible objectives, then groped around for so adequate point of convergence. anwhile, the company shouldered the entire cost of their failures.
'So this is the kind of people we were being exploited by?'
A flicker of contempt crossed Alex's eyes.
He looked at the CEO and spoke.
"Fire the person in charge imdiately.
This model is designed to fulfill as much demand as possible. But the inventory managent algorithm is set to minimize the risk of stockouts. anwhile, the logistics model moves in the direction of reducing storage and transportation costs."
He drew three arrows on the board.
They were all pointing in different directions.
"There's no way a system this idiotic would function properly. Let ask you directly. What is your true objective?"
"Hmm."
"Well...."
While the board mbers struggled to answer, the CEO spoke with a smile.
"Reducing logistics and transportation costs while maintaining delivery reliability. If we also want to maximize profit on top of that, is that too greedy?"
Alex nodded.
"Of course it's possible."
He directed the design of a new system.
The core was simple.
'From now on, orders are not a performance tric. They are a decision variable.'
-Reflecting inventory and logistics costs in real ti, the system permits only orders worth accepting.
-Orders that fail to et conditions are intentionally delayed or rejected.
What Arc Wave designed was a decision gate.
When an order ca in, the predictive model calculated the final cost of the order. If the cost exceeded the baseline, it was rejected.
The results of the new system were dramatic.
Revenue decreased slightly, but net profit rose by double digits, and delivery satisfaction also climbed significantly. Most importantly, complaints from the field disappeared. The CEO, deeply satisfied with the results, paid him an enormous consulting fee.
It was the mont he secured the capital to grow his company overnight.
Alex aggressively expanded the company's size after that.
He sought out papers with comrcial potential, read them, and went to recruit the authors. Mathematicians were generally poor and naive, so they could not easily turn down his offers.
Then he drew up blueprints for applying the research as technology and sold them to companies that needed it.
At so point, people in the math community began calling him not by his na but by a nickna.
'Faust.'
The man who, in despair at reality, sold his soul to the devil.
Alex laughed heartily when he heard he was being called by such a nickna.
Around that ti, one student caught his eye.
Theodore Langford, who was making a na for himself in academia just as Alex had during his own undergraduate days. His papers on Topological Critical Points reeked of money.
If he could recruit Theodore and cultivate an engineering perspective in him, he could create the risk modeling that every insurance company would kill to have.
But the eting with him did not go as planned.
"Huh? Why would I?"
Theodore waved his hand dismissively and rejected the offer without a second thought.
"You know what? Analysis and Topology are the least profitable fields in all of mathematics. But I can help you turn your theory into real-world applications. And massive wealth is just a bonus.
Sounds like you've got nothing to lose, doesn't it?"
Theodore shook his head as if the proposition were beneath him.
"I want a theorem with my na on it. I'm going to solve a Millennium Prize Problem and turn the world upside down. So get out of my sight, Faust."
That was a long ti ago.
Tap.
Alex set his coffee cup down on the table.
A short while later, Theodore appeared at the cafe in a black coat. He glanced at Alex, then sat down in the chair across from him.
"Get to the point."
A short, dry voice.
The previous day, Theodore had received a ssage from Alex asking to et.
He was in a sour mood, but he had co to the eting place figuring he might as well hear what the man had to say.
"Don't be so prickly. Do you have any idea how many mathematicians got rich because of ? Without , they'd all be scraping by."
"The point."
Alex sighed.
"Retract the paper. Then there won't be any problems."
Theodore slowly raised his eyes to et Alex's.
"Why? Did our paper cause problems with your contracts?"
Alex's brow furrowed.
Theodore's guess was spot on. Arc Wave had contracts with a number of companies, and Team Apex's paper had uprooted the implicit assumptions their models depended on from the very foundation.
What corporations truly feared was not the financial damage this would cause.
It was having to publicly admit that their models could fail mathematically, and from that mont on, the company that had consulted on those models could no longer escape liability either.
"Retract the paper. I'll open a path for you. Let's just chalk it up to a genius's miscalculation.
This field has no answers anyway. It's a competition where everyone takes wrong answers and argues over who got closest to the approximation."
Alex had defined Minimal Energy as an unsolvable problem.
This was a judgnt he could make precisely because he understood mathematics so well.
"Hahaha!"
Theodore laughed loudly, as if he found it genuinely amusing.
But Alex rely shrugged.
"Laugh while you can. What's coming next won't be very pleasant for your side."
Theodore abruptly stopped laughing and fixed Alex with a glare.
"You have an inferiority complex toward Seo-ha, don't you?"
"What?"
"That broadcast. There had to be a better way to go about it, but no matter how I think about it, it wasn't like you at all. And eting you today, I get it now.
The spotlight Seo-ha's getting right now, the expectations, the praise. Don't tell you think of that as sothing you could have had?"
Alex was soone who rarely showed emotion, but in this mont, he could not maintain his composure.
His face turned bright red with anger and sha.
"Hahahaha! You don't have to answer. I'll take what I've heard as confirmation!"
The hand holding his coffee cup trembled.
Why had he disliked Yu Seo-ha?
He had seen and heard the na countless tis while scouting mathematicians. The first emotion he felt toward Seo-ha was pity.
'Wasting talent like that on sothing as trivial as proving the Four Color Theorem.'
When Seo-ha had completely overhauled Boston's signal system, Alex thought that if he had been by his side, he could have helped him earn a hundred tis more.
Up until then, he had regarded Yu Seo-ha as nothing more than wasted talent.
But when he heard the news that Seo-ha had solved one of Smale's Problems, his feelings shifted to shock for the first ti. And now Seo-ha was tackling the Minimal Energy Surface problem, the hardest of the hard.
'Could I have beco like that?'
If he hadn't compromised back then and had left his answer sheet blank instead.
He shook his head, shaking off the thought.
'That's already in the past.'
Alex looked Theodore straight in the eye and spoke.
"If the contracts are terminated, Arc Wave intends to file a massive damages lawsuit against your team. You've disrupted the market with a paper that hasn't been conclusively proven and undermined the credibility of our company."
Theodore bared his teeth in a grin.
"Go right ahead. We're confident.
Public debate, colloquium. We'll welco any of it. In the courtroom too."
Screech.
He had heard everything he needed to hear.
Theodore pushed his chair back and stood up. Before leaving, he looked at Alex and added, as if as an afterthought:
"Oh! And it seems like you think of yourself as an 'unlucky Seo-ha', but I'd like to tell you that's a very serious misunderstanding."
Alex's brow furrowed.
"And why is that? Because I'm Faust?
Faust was a man who sold his soul for the sake of his ideals. Put another way, he never gave up on ideals and truth until the very end."
Theodore shook his head with a smile.
"No, it's because you're not Faust. You're phistopheles, the one who collects the souls of mathematicians. At least Faust put his own soul on the line."
"What?"
"You never had one to begin with. A mathematician's soul.
So if I had to put it into words, you're.... a rchant who's good at math? Not that there's anything wrong with that."
Theodore walked out of the cafe without waiting for a reply.
Alex stared down at his cold coffee for a long ti.
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