Chapter 254

Translator: Dreamscribe

The students who had come to the lecture out of fandom or curiosity quietly began putting their belongings back into their bags.

'This is insane.'

'Is he even speaking English? I can't understand a single word.'

'Save me! I need to get out of here right now!'

Reading the room, Seo-ha smiled and pointed toward the back door.

“Yu-Riemann Geometry requires you to break away from many of your existing intuitions.

So I'll give those of you who came to audit the class or just out of curiosity a chance to reconsider. Feel free to leave.”

Scrape.

The moment he finished speaking, the students seated near the back of the lecture hall and along the aisle stairs all sprang to their feet.

Clack!

Crash!

“Excuse me!”

“I'm going first. I need to survive!”

No one even bothered to wait and see who would move first. A mass exodus immediately followed.

Students from other departments who had come to see the famous professor, students who had

overestimated themselves. All of them hurried out with their bags clutched against their chests.

Bang!

The exodus was brief but intense.

More than half of the once-crowded lecture hall emptied in an instant.

'Hmph! What a bunch of half-hearted amateurs.'

Leander sneered as he watched them leave.

'If you've decided to walk the path of mathematics, then Professor Yu Seo-ha should obviously be the goal.'

That man had solved the Four Color Theorem entirely on his own at just thirteen years old. Compared to that, Hadwiger's Conjecture ought to be a battle with far better odds.

Of course, that wasn't the only reason.

'If I still get stuck when the professor is openly offering hints, then I have no future.'

They weren't merely passing up a priceless opportunity. They were running away because they were scared. Leander despised people who claimed they wanted to pursue mathematics with such shallow resolve.

Leander gave a cold smile and straightened in his seat.

"......"

"......"

Far too many had left.

With so many empty seats, an awkward silence settled over the lecture hall. The students worried that the newly appointed professor might be disappointed in both the university and them.

But Seo-ha looked at them with a bright smile and said,

“Congratulations. You've just passed the first hurdle toward becoming outstanding mathematicians.”

“What?”

Confusion filled the students' faces.

“There is one quality every mathematician must possess. It was true in the past, and it remains true today.”

He slowly looked around the now sparsely occupied lecture hall.

“That quality is courage.”

The unexpected answer made the students hold their breath.

“I'm not saying this to criticize the students who left. Majoring in mathematics doesn't mean everyone has to become a mathematician. But remember this.”

Gulp.

“Mathematicians are people who make a profession of failure. Perhaps failure itself is the very essence of this career.

The courage to knowingly throw yourself at an unsolved problem anyway. That, to me, is the most important quality a mathematician can possess, regardless of the result.”

A solemn mood settled over the lecture hall.

The students felt relieved.

'So we don't necessarily have to solve the unsolved problem.'

It was, in a way, his way of telling them to grow accustomed to failure. But a few students understood what lay between the lines.

Florin tightened her grip on the pen in her hand.

'Idiots. What the professor said wasn't meant to comfort us.'

He was telling them to keep throwing themselves at the problem until they succeeded. Only then could they become true mathematicians.

The beauty of mathematics he had spoken of at the beginning, along with the wonder of the universe contained within it, was a privilege reserved for those who overcame those failures.

A smile spread across her lips.

'I like it.'

Running away had never crossed her mind in the first place.

“Now, let's begin again.”

The fundamental concepts of Yu-Riemann Geometry.

Scratch scratch.

How many mathematics students at Harvard and MIT didn't own a copy of his book?

Florin had bought Introduction to Yu-Riemann Geometry as soon as it was published and read it so many times that the corners were worn ragged.

The theory had been so difficult that she had wondered whether the book had been written by the devil.

Whenever she encountered a concept she didn't understand, she searched for papers on it, and to understand those papers, she opened still more textbooks. One subject led endlessly into another.

After months of effort, the day Florin finally understood the basic framework of Yu-Riemann Geometry left her deeply moved.

The contradictions of space that conventional geometry had failed to explain.

The professor's geometry took integers, one of mathematics' most fundamental tools, and used them to resolve those contradictions in a single stroke.

It was truly an art of numbers and space.

'I'm going to keep up with him no matter what.'

Seo-ha continued his explanation.

“You may find this hard to believe, but space tells us what shape it has. Riemann translated that voice into mathematics, and Ricci compressed it again into tensors.

But in Yu-Riemann Geometry, we track the energy states at which it produces discontinuous resonance. Let's look at this graph.”

The mathematician she had admired for so long.

His explanation was extraordinarily difficult, yet remarkably concise.

'This is hard.'

The density of his derivations was unimaginably high.

He skipped far too many intermediate steps while deriving each theorem. Even so, Florin could just barely keep up.

Because she was sufficiently prepared.

“Now, let's extend this into higher dimensions. Curvature in four-dimensional space is....”

The professor seemed insane.

Human vision was optimized for three-dimensional space, which made higher dimensions difficult to comprehend.

That was why mathematicians examined shapes through cross-sections. It was similar to how slicing a three-dimensional sphere produced a two-dimensional circle.

But he drew the twisting of a four-dimensional manifold across the blackboard as though he were seeing it directly with his own eyes. Strange geometric forms whose meaning was impossible to grasp.

His voice was filled with certainty.

'Can he actually see it?'

Judging by his demeanor, he wasn't extrapolating.

At the tip of his chalk, four-dimensional hyperspheres and intricately distorted tori flipped over, shifted their spatial axes, and interlocked with one another.

Using nothing more than abstract logical symbols and tensor transformations, the professor maintained perfect control over higher-dimensional geometric structures.

'That's impossible! He can actually picture those structures in his head?'

How?

The human brain shouldn't be able to perceive anything beyond three dimensions.

Florin couldn't remember ever concentrating this intensely in her life.

And yet she still couldn't fully grasp the structure of his logic on the spot.

'Write down every part I don't understand. I can't miss a single word.'

Scratch scratch.

Florin's hand raced across the page.

She recorded not only every equation the professor wrote on the board, but even every seemingly casual word that left his mouth.

“That will be all for today's class.”

Seo-ha set down the chalk.

"......"

"......"

The students looked completely dazed.

“Haaah!”

The moment someone finally released the breath they had been holding, groans erupted throughout the room.

Florin stared blankly down at her densely packed notes. She had gripped her pen so hard that the fingers holding it were bruised. Her notes were so frantic that she could barely tell what she had written.

Scrape.

As soon as class ended, she headed straight for the library.

One day, then two.

At some point, she began finding the thought of attending her other classes annoying. She already knew the material, so did she really need to go?

"......I'm skipping class."

With a headache that felt as though her skull might split open, Florin buried herself in her notes, even cutting into the time she spent eating.

Then, after several days and nights of relentless study, dawn arrived.

“Ah...”

A gasp escaped her lips.

Hundreds of tangled equations began meshing together and turning in unison. A perfect chain of logic without a single discrepancy. Every piece clicked into place like the gears of an intricate machine.

Then the geometric world the professor had drawn during class appeared clearly in her mind as a four-dimensional structure.

“So this is what it was.”

Following the equations the professor had derived revealed a higher-dimensional space where even time itself stood still. It was a bizarre world where the inside became the outside, and the outside became the inside.

Each time the waves generated by the functions he had crafted resonated, the manifolds pulsed as though they were breathing.

It was wondrous.

Tears rolled down her cheeks at the thrill she had never experienced before in her life.

“Sniff.”

She wiped away her tears and read through her notes again.

'I can see all of it.'

It was impossible to fully represent a four-dimensional shape on a two-dimensional blackboard.

It was like trying to explain the beauty of classical music to someone who had been deaf since birth.

Someone who had never been able to hear could not understand the rise and fall of sound.

Nor harmony, melody, or the emotion they evoked.

That was why the professor had used this method.

Vibration.

The geometric figures he had drawn were speakers.

By having the students place their hands against them, the professor had allowed them to feel the raw vibrations traveling through flesh and bone.

Now that she understood, she realized his explanation had been nothing short of brilliant. Without such a method, she might not have understood it even after several semesters.

Then a question suddenly occurred to her.

'How many people understood it?'

Professor Yu Seo-ha's lecture truly was meant only for the chosen few. Florin felt deeply relieved to know that she was one of them.

***

Department of Mathematics Dean's Office.

Whitman glared at the report lying on his desk.

The mass departure that had occurred on the first day of class.

Rumors had already spread throughout the campus. Both the university administration and Whitman, who had recommended Seo-ha for the position, couldn't help but feel nervous.

The report contained the results of a survey conducted by the administrative office during the second week of the course.

[Professor Yu Seo-ha's 'Introduction to Yu-Riemann Geometry' Student Survey Results]

-Type A : Is this an alien language? I can't understand any of it. (70%)

“I felt like a chimpanzee. Will I ever become human in that class?”

-Type B : It's hellishly difficult, but I can vaguely understand what he's getting at. (20%)

“I didn't understand anything during the lecture, but after studying all night, I think I'm starting to get it. It's brutally spicy, but now my stubborn side has kicked in, so I'm going to hang on for now.”

-Type C : The best lecture of my life. A whole new world opened up to me. (10%)

“Maybe I started studying mathematics just so I could take this lecture. The emotion and thrill I felt then are still vivid.

I'll probably never forget it for the rest of my life. I sincerely thank you, Professor.”

For an ordinary course, the results were disastrous enough to warrant immediately convening a committee.

The Teaching Assistant explained with a deeply tense expression.

“Dean, as you can see, the situation is serious. Seventy percent of the students are practically failing. I heard the administrative office is extremely concerned as well.

Wouldn't it be better to at least say something to Professor Yu Seo-ha?”

The Dean looked at the Teaching Assistant as though wondering what on earth he was talking about.

“Hmm? What do you mean? What is there to say?”

“The failing....”

“Hahahaha!”

Whitman burst into hearty laughter and closed the report.

“Ten percent!”

“Yes. Only ten percent managed to follow the lecture.”

“Professor Yu must have worked incredibly hard.”

Question marks practically floated above the Teaching Assistant's head.

“Ah! You said quite a few students came from Harvard too, didn't you? If all the so-called geniuses from both schools gathered there, I suppose numbers like that make sense. That's a much better result than I expected.”

“What?”

Whitman stroked his chin.

“I had even considered the possibility that not a single student would understand him. I'm extremely relieved that isn't the case. It's a large class, and a full tenth of them are actually keeping up, aren't they?

Look at what those students wrote.”

The Teaching Assistant read the results again.

“'A whole new world opened up to me.'”

“Exactly. Isn't that incredible? A full ten percent of the students!”

“That is?”

The Dean sighed.

“Do you know how many formal students Gödel left behind during his time at Princeton?”

“He was there for more than thirty years, so wouldn't it have been around a hundred?”

Whitman chuckled.

“Zero!

Gödel never served as anyone's dissertation advisor. The students avoided him too.

The only people who could really hold a conversation with him were the likes of Einstein and von Neumann. Compared to him, just look at how excellent Seo-ha is!”

The Dean continued laughing in satisfaction.

*****

For more chapters, join my Patreon: https://patreon.com/dreamscribe

If you enjoy this novel, please review and rate it at Novelupdates. Thanks! 😊

To receive the latest update notifications or report mistakes, join our Discord server linked below.