Translator: Dreamscribe
The taxi stopped in front of the campus.
Theodore paid the fare by card and stepped out of the car. The cold wind cut through his clothes in an instant.
Whooosh-
"Damn, it's freezing."
Massive columns reminiscent of the Parthenon stood before him.
"They really went and built sothing like this right on a main road."
He pulled up his coat collar and tugged open the heavy door.
Inside the long corridor, there was the distinctive sll of wax and coffee that perated the infinite hallway. Posters and seminar notices covered every inch of the walls.
[Geotry Seminar Tonight - Students from Other Departnts Welco]
[P-Set Night, Everyone Behind on Assignnts, Co Join Us]
["You Can Do It." - Linear Algebra Study Group]
[Looking for Chalkboard Cleaning Volunteers - Please note that all chalkboards will be wiped clean at 6 PM]
Theodore scanned the notices as he quickened his pace. When he reached the end of the corridor, a blue sign ca into view.
[Departnt of Mathematics]
"Looks like this is the place."
He pushed the door open and was greeted by a familiar atmosphere.
A printer ran nonstop, spitting out papers.
On the communal table, half-finished cups of coffee, several math journals, and scratch notebooks were scattered in a ss.
"Mathematicians are the sa slobs no matter where you go."
Theodore let out a light laugh at the chalk dust tickling his nose.
The tension eased on its own.
After walking a bit further, he spotted the reception desk.
"Excuse . Would it be possible to et a math student nad Yu Seo-ha?"
"Who are you?"
The staff mber squinted up at Theodore.
Theo decided to be generous and give her the benefit of the doubt. Even back when he was making a na for himself, there had been no shortage of suspicious people showing up at the university.
"I sent an email yesterday... My na is Theodore Langford, from Stanford."
When he presented his student ID, the staff mber's tone softened slightly.
"I can't give out a student's personal information. However, I can tell you where Seo-ha usually hangs out."
Theo nodded.
"That would be more than enough."
The staff mber spoke with a professional smile.
"He seems to be studying alone these days. I heard he's been stuck on the sa problem for several days...
He's often by the window at Hayden Library or at the Barker Cafe. If not there, try the lecture halls or his private study room."
Theo was taken aback.
A private study room for an undergraduate...
"Thank you."
He headed straight for the cafeteria.
He circled the place twice from the entrance to the very back, but the face he had seen in the newspaper was nowhere to be found.
'Not here, then.'
He was about to leave when the savory sll of bread lured him in.
Growl-
The only thing he had eaten in the last twelve hours was the miserable in-flight al the airline had served.
Rock-hard crackers, cheap orange juice in a plastic cup, and a sandwich with a dreadful taste thanks to all the vegetables having gone soggy.
He had forced it down out of hunger, but it was a flavor he never wanted near his mouth again.
'They wouldn't refuse to feed just because I'm an outsider, would they?'
Theo muttered to himself as he pulled a card from his wallet.
There happened to be a shop nearby with an 'Open to the Public' sign posted out front.
He ordered a warm coffee and a bagel.
The freshly baked bagel was distinctly different from the ones he used to eat at Stanford.
Instead of the sweet West Coast style, it was a New England bagel with a chewy texture and a rich wheat aroma.
He toasted it lightly and spread a generous amount of cream cheese on it. Inside were sesa seeds, garlic, and onion, giving it a clean yet rich East Coast flavor.
"Goes perfectly with coffee."
Outside the window, snowflakes drifted against a gray sky.
He gazed at the scenery outside for a mont, then rose from his seat.
Ti to get moving again.
"Where on earth is he?"
He had checked both the library and the cafeteria as the staff mber had suggested, but couldn't find even a trace of him.
'Is he not on campus?'
The thought crossed his mind that he had flown out here far too recklessly. He decided to stop by the office one last ti and leave a note.
Entering the math building from outside, he noticed a chalkboard wall stretching the length of the corridor.
"Wow!"
Both walls were entirely covered in chalkboards.
Standing before the endless wall of numbers, Theo shivered for a mont.
He walked slowly, scanning the chalkboards.
Calculus of variations, topology, geotry, Ricci flow...
'This derivation thod is...'
Theo paused mid-step.
It was the very formula that had once set the world abuzz, his own.
A smile spread across his face unbidden, filled with pride.
True to its nickna of "infinite hallway", the corridor went on and on.
[Who solved an electromagnetism problem here?]
└You guys solve math problems everywhere too.
└Oh? Fair point. Sorry.
Each chalkboard bore notes in different handwriting.
Among the playful doodles, traces of serious inquiry peeked through. He found the undergraduates' passion endearing and let out a small chuckle.
As he continued walking, a chalkboard that felt distinctly out of place caught his eye. It contained sothing he couldn't readily understand.
Theo stopped in front of it.
"Huh?"
Equations in neat handwriting filled the chalkboard to the brim.
He stared hard, but the author's intent didn't reveal itself at a glance.
He decided to look for the starting point.
"Is this where it begins?"
This part must be the beginning.
A theorem concerning the an value. But as it progressed downward, the structure twisted in a peculiar way.
Theo narrowed his eyes.
The equations were so dense it was hard to grasp the content properly. Still, after staring at them for a long while, the flow began to faintly erge.
'An attempt to extend the an value theorem to non-uniform spaces?'
Integral signs and probability density functions tangled together in a chaotic web, generating new aning.
The author had been exploring various approaches, testing the potential of their own theory.
"Ah!"
Theo let out a sharp gasp.
Whoosh.
He backed up as far as he could to take in the entire chalkboard from a distance.
Then he drew a deep breath.
"Could it be... Smale's an value problem?"
It was a conjecture proposed decades ago by Arican mathematician Stephen Smale.
An open problem asking whether a differentiable function on a non-uniform asure space still satisfies the an value theorem.
Theo's heart began to race.
'That can't be right. There's no way an undergraduate would be tackling sothing like this!'
It was an old problem, passed down quietly among analysts through word of mouth.
There had been attempts to extend the an value theorem to spaces where curvature and density were not constant, but it had never been established. The definition of the asure was influenced by the geotric structure of the function, creating self-contradictions.
Mathematicians of the ti would say in unison:
"It's a problem about finding an average that doesn't exist."
And so no one, not even Smale himself, had ever completed the paper.
Most likely, young mathematicians of the current generation didn't even know the problem existed.
'I'm not one of them, though...'
He had always been interested in unsolved problems.
It had originally been to find ideas for his master's thesis, but sotis that knowledge proved useful in unexpected places like this.
Theo followed the clues left on the chalkboards.
"They set the weights as nonlinear."
The author's handwriting continued at regular intervals.
As it did, what had been abstract ideas gradually took concrete shape, one by one.
"Here, they set the function as a probability density. Could they be trying to translate the concept of the an value into a probability space?"
What a fearless person, he thought.
It was an approach that could beco enormously complex, yet the author showed no hesitation in pushing the boundaries of the concept.
He moved on again.
At the end of the corridor was a window, and beneath it sat a small chalkboard.
The equations there were scrawled in a very rough hand, as if jotted down in a hurry. The chalk had faded, suggesting several days had passed.
A theorem that had advanced the probabilistic and geotric approach much further.
The author had ultimately succeeded in formalizing this dizzying concept into equations.
Now the full picture was visible.
The fierce traces of thought left behind by a mathematician.
Formulas had been erased and rewritten multiple tis. And the nurous annotations added afterward were scattered haphazardly throughout the corridor.
"Do they have no intention of publishing a paper?"
There was no system to this proof.
It was as though fleeting thoughts had simply been let go, left behind in the mont they arose.
The developnt of an equation would break off midway, then suddenly continue on a neighboring chalkboard. There were no directional arrows or connecting lines between symbols or sentences.
Only the author themselves could possibly follow this in its entirety.
'Were they on the way to class? Or heading to a al? It looks like they scribbled it all down so they wouldn't forget...'
The author must have picked up the chalk during brief monts between moving from the library to the lecture hall, leaving traces as they went.
Theo stopped in front of one casually written formula.
'This idea is far more profound than it looks. With just a little expansion, it could easily beco a paper worthy of a major journal.'
Brilliant insights that couldn't possibly co from an undergraduate were scattered all over the corridor.
"Tch!"
Theo clicked his tongue.
Because he had a good idea who the author was.
Rounding the corner and walking a bit further, he saw a student in a gray hoodie standing by the window.
The student stood motionless for a long while, apparently deep in thought, then twirled a piece of chalk in his left hand before writing out equations with ferocious intensity.
Before long the snow had stopped, and sunlight peeked through the overcast sky.
When the light streaming through the window illuminated the student's face, Theo's eyes widened. He had grown quite a bit, but it was unmistakably the sa face from the newspaper.
'Yu Seo-ha!'
Theo was about to call out but hesitated.
Seo-ha was far too absorbed. Besides, the fact that he couldn't tell what Seo-ha was currently working on stung his pride in a strange way.
Theo wandered among the nearby chalkboards, retracing the course of Seo-ha's thinking.
He followed with his eyes, tracking where the equations currently being written had originated and which direction they were flowing.
It felt as though he were walking through an enormous maze.
Seo-ha's thinking moved more by intuition than logic, and it veered sharply from ti to ti.
Even so, there was a consistent axis running through it all.
If all the scattered ideas were gathered together, they pointed toward precisely the sa conclusion.
'Did I lose track of ti?'
The sun was already setting.
Catching himself, he turned his head and found Seo-ha staring at him.
"You're the first person to actually recognize what this is."
At Seo-ha's words, Theo broke into a grin.
"Of course. If it weren't , no one would have even noticed. But why are you working on sothing as obscure as the Smale problem?"
Seo-ha tilted his head.
"The Smale problem? What's that?"
"What you're doing right now. It's a problem Stephen Smale proposed back in the seventies.
You're the one who told about it first, rember? You said I did well to recognize it."
Seo-ha blinked as if he had no idea what Theo was talking about.
"I ant that I was impressed you could tell how interesting this problem is. I thought LOGIA had made it up..."
Theo pressed a hand to his forehead.
He had forgotten about LOGIA's existence the entire day.
The situation was becoming clear.
LOGIA, having failed to create a problem that Seo-ha couldn't solve, had dumped an unsolved problem on him instead. And Yu Seo-ha, none the wiser, had been working on solving it.
"That damn tin can... So, have you made any progress?"
Seo-ha nodded innocently.
"Yes! I think I'll probably be able to solve it in a few days.
I struggled because I've never studied Analysis in depth, but over the past few days I've definitely gotten a feel for it."
'Solve it in a few days? The Smale problem? And he's saying he's never even studied Analysis?'
While Theo stood there in shock, Seo-ha asked him a question.
"By the way, who are you?"
'I thought he recognized .'
"I'm..."
He couldn't finish the introduction. The clock hanging at the end of the corridor had caught his eye.
'5:50.'
His brain itched.
A feeling like he was forgetting sothing important. Whenever this happened, sothing big always went wrong.
Theo racked his brain desperately.
And at last, he managed to recall the notice he had passed that morning.
[Looking for Chalkboard Cleaning Volunteers - Please note that all chalkboards will be wiped clean at 6 PM]
Theo shouted urgently.
"Damn it! All the chalkboards are going to be wiped at six. We need to go stop them, now!"
"What? Why?"
Seo-ha looked completely baffled.
"All the ideas you wrote on the chalkboards are going to be erased!"
"I don't mind, though? I rember the overall flow of everything..."
"Don't be ridiculous! How could you possibly rember all of that?
So of those could contain clues that would give mathematicians crucial inspiration!"
Theo's voice echoed through the corridor.
As a fellow mathematician, he couldn't stand by and watch valuable ideas vanish.
"Huh?"
Seeing Seo-ha standing there in a daze made his frustration boil over.
"For crying out loud! Why do I have to be the one!"
Theo gritted his teeth. Then he sprinted toward the departnt office with every ounce of strength he had.
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