Chapter 253

Translator: Dreamscribe

Early February, on the MIT campus as the spring semester began.

The weather in New England was brutal at this time of year. Even so, perhaps because of the anticipation of a new semester, the students' faces were full of energy.

Whoosh-

The icy wind blowing in from the Charles River swept mercilessly across the campus.

On the lawn, the snow that had yet to melt was frozen as hard as stone.

A group of students hurried in the same direction as if they had all agreed to meet there.

Their destination was none other than the mathematics department's main lecture hall, where the first lecture on Yu-Riemann Geometry, the hottest topic of the semester and a course nearly ten thousand people had tried to register for, was about to begin.

“Let's hurry. If we get there late, we might have trouble finding seats."

“It's the main lecture hall, isn't it? Registration closed ages ago.”

"You think the people who got cut are just going to give up? They'll come sit in on the lecture anyway.”

His concern was justified.

As soon as they rounded the corner toward the lecture hall, everyone stared in disbelief at the sight before them.

“Whoa.... This is insane.”

There were still twenty minutes until class, yet the hallway was already packed shoulder to shoulder. Every book in their hands was the same: Introduction to Yu-Riemann Geometry.

Murmurs rose from all around.

“At this point, it's basically a standing-room-only concert.” “Isn't that an assistant professor from computer science? Why is he standing over there?”

The moment the lecture hall doors opened, the students surged inside all at once.

The tiered lecture hall, large enough to hold several hundred people, filled up in an instant.

The seats were long gone, and students who entered late either sat down on the aisle steps or leaned against the back wall, finding whatever space they could.

“Hey, isn't that Florin over there?”

“Leander's here too. Holy crap! LOGIA's number one and two are sitting together!"

Florin Kingsley of Harvard's mathematics department and Leander Moss, MIT's rising star. The man and woman seated in the front glanced at one another before casually looking away.

Theodore, who had dominated LOGIA for years, had suddenly vanished from the rankings one day. The same was true of the other Team Apex members.

They simply hadn't had the time while working on Utopia and the Life Matrix Project.

The moment the top rankers disappeared, the positions they left behind became a bloody battlefield.

Brilliant minds from around the world rushed in to claim the vacant throne, kicking off a fierce free-for-all.

And after more than a year of chaos, two people had finally risen above the rest to form a new two-way rivalry: Florin and Leander.

To make matters worse, they belonged to Harvard and MIT. With the rivalry between their schools piled on top of everything else, the two had become like oil and water, bitter rivals who couldn't stand each other.

“Maybe the world's about to end. Never thought I'd see those two in the same lecture hall.”

“Ugh! They were pretty embarrassing, though. Every time their LOGIA rankings switched, they'd get into online fights and rub it in each other's faces. They've probably only seen each other's faces online. This might be the first time they've actually met.”

Neither of them so much as flinched at the whispers around them.

Florin twirled her pen between her fingers while staring at the board, while Leander simply sat with his chin propped on one hand.

Florin looked at Leander and spoke with her eyes.

'Move somewhere else while I'm still asking nicely.'

'Why should I? You move. This seat has the best view.'

There was a reason they had become so obsessed with the rankings.

It was well known that Seo-ha paid close attention to LOGIA. Theodore had reigned supreme there for years, and Cecilia had also joined Team Apex through LOGIA.

Naturally, both of them were convinced that if they could claim the throne, they would have a chance to become full-fledged members of Team Apex.

“He's coming!”

Step.

Step.

Rattle.

The door opened, and the lecture hall fell so silent that it seemed everyone had stopped breathing. Hundreds of students turned toward the same place at once.

Seo-ha walked in.

He wore a neat jacket over a white shirt, without a tie. In his hands were only a box of chalk and a thin notebook.

'He really is young.'

'Wasn't he the same age as me.........'

'He's handsome! He really pulls off that outfit.'

A monster who had proven the Riemann Hypothesis and won the Fields Prize while still in his teens.

But what truly shocked mathematicians was the fact that he excelled in every branch of mathematics.

After all, Yu-Riemann Geometry had been born from his ability to move freely between Algebra, Number Theory, Topology, and Geometry.

Even the greatest mathematicians normally had their own specialties.

But Seo-ha was different. If he needed a concept from another field, he would use it without hesitation. Even concepts from biology and computer science.

Several years had passed since Yu-Riemann Geometry first appeared.

Scholars now described his geometry as a bridge connecting branches of mathematics that had once stood apart.

Seo-ha slowly looked around the lecture hall before speaking.

“Hello. Welcome to Yu-Riemann Geometry. My name is Yu Seo-ha, and I'll be teaching this course starting this semester.”

His voice was gentle but clear. The students swallowed nervously and waited for him to continue.

“To be honest, when the dean first offered me a professorship, I hesitated for quite a long time.

I wasn't sure whether I could fully convey to all of you the beauty of mathematics that I had felt, and the wonder of the universe inherent within it.”

Smiles appeared on the students' faces.

The worries of a once-in-a-century genius inspired awe. At the same time, their concern that he might turn out to be some bizarre eccentric eased a little.

“But!"

For a moment, his eyes gleamed like those of a madman.

“Here, I have seen it. Your passion, filling not only this lecture hall but the entire corridor! My worries were nothing more than arrogance and needless concern.”

The students flinched.

'Huh? I just came because I was curious.'

“No, no, Professor. I didn't come here with that kind of grim determination!”

'This is way too much pressure.'

To Seo-ha, however, their tense expressions looked like faces filled with steely resolve.

'They're this desperate for knowledge.'

Seo-ha was deeply moved. His chest grew hot with excitement.

He would show these passionate students the very essence of the mathematics he had discovered, without holding anything back!

“Yu-Riemann Geometry projects the discontinuous structure of integers onto a higher-dimensional Riemannian Manifold. As a result, integers become states within the space, and those states interfere with one another like quantum wave functions, forming new topological structures.”

It was already difficult. The students' heads were spinning.

“During that process, I discovered something. The logical bottlenecks that had blocked conventional Number Theory and Geometry begin to reveal openings the moment they are brought into Yu-Riemann Space.”

There were thousands of unsolved problems in mathematics.

Research was still limited, but Yu-Riemann Geometry held the potential to solve a significant number of them.

Gulp.

'What is he trying to say?'

'No way...'

The students held their breath and stared at his face.

“Hmm.... This one should work!"

Scratch, scratch.

「Hadwiger's Conjecture(Hadwiger's conjecture on covering convex),

“This is the famous unsolved problem commonly known as Hadwiger's illumination problem.”

The students nodded.

It was a fairly well-known unsolved problem in Geometry, asking for the minimum number of light sources needed to fully illuminate a shape without leaving any shadows. Since Hadwiger first proposed it in 1960, it had remained unsolved.

“For a two-dimensional triangle, you only need lanterns at its three vertices. A quadrilateral would require four. To fully illuminate a three-dimensional cube, you need as many light sources as there are vertices, meaning a minimum of eight.”

His clear explanation continued alongside drawings on the board.

Sixteen for four dimensions, thirty-two for five. An N-dimensional cube always had 2^N vertices. Therefore, it required the same number of light sources.

“Everything up to this point has already been proven.

But what about distorted polyhedra whose shapes are impossible to predict? And what if the boundary itself is warped within a multidimensional space?”

Swish.

Seo-ha smiled and underlined the words on the board.

“This is our goal for the semester. We will use Yu-Riemann Geometry to completely unravel these irregular distortions.”

The students looked puzzled. Leander quietly raised his hand and asked,

“I have a question. Does that mean, Professor, that you're going to solve that unsolved problem for us during this semester's course?”

They would get to watch a problem that had remained unsolved for more than half a century being solved right before their eyes. Live, no less. It would be nothing short of a historic event.

Anticipation appeared on the students' faces.

“No.”

Seo-ha shook his head with a bright smile. His denial was so firm that everyone was left speechless.

“That wouldn't mean anything. My goal is for all of you sitting here to solve this problem yourselves by the end of the semester.”

Surely he wasn't telling them to solve a decades-old unsolved problem for their final assignment.

Everyone doubted their ears. But what the professor

was saying could not have been clearer. The students' mouths fell open.

“You're joking, right?”

“That's impossible! If it were that easy, someone would've solved it ages ago! You don't even know the answer yourself, Professor.”

Seo-ha's face fell.

The students instinctively felt guilty. He slowly opened his mouth as if trying to persuade them.

“Of course I know the answer. I wouldn't assign an impossible problem.”

The students' eyes widened.

“When on earth did you solve it? And why haven't you published it?”

“Well...."

Seo-ha trailed off.

“I solved it while talking to all of you just now.”

"........"

“What?”

“You're not joking, are you?”

In truth, he had seen the answer almost as soon as he wrote the problem down.

It became simple once he viewed it through Yu-Riemann Space. The topological separation created by the curvature of the shape and the spectral problem of its boundary.

Sharp intakes of breath came from all around the lecture hall.

'It's fine. They're only surprised because we haven't started the course yet. Once I explain it, everyone will be able to solve it.'

The thrill he had felt upon solving an unsolved problem.

Seo-ha wanted to give his students that same moment. He spoke with complete sincerity.

“Don't worry. If it were impossible, I wouldn't have brought it up in the first place. It may seem difficult right now.

But I'm certain. If you learn it step by step, there will come a moment when the fog clears and the path naturally appears before you.”

Tap.

Florin's pen fell onto the desk.

Every student in the room realized the same thing.

'He's not bluffing. He's not joking either.'

He genuinely believed they could do it.

That they could solve a problem no one had managed to crack in decades.

'Once you learn it, you'll get it in no time!'

That seemed to be what the professor's beaming face was saying. Screams erupted simultaneously inside the students' minds.

'That's only possible because you're the professor!'

They wanted to argue. It made absolutely no sense by any normal standard.

But the professor standing before the board was the man who had proven the Riemann Hypothesis before he even turned twenty. And that man was telling them they could do it.

A spark returned to the eyes of several students.

Florin glanced to the side. Leander had straightened his back and adjusted his posture in his seat.

She gritted her teeth.

*****

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