Chapter 255

Translator: Dreamscribe

[Are the rumors about Professor Yu Seo-ha true?]

-My roommate came back from Yu-Riemann Geometry and now he's got his head buried in his bed.

He's crying and going, “I'm a chimpanzee, ooh-ooh-ah-ah.” I felt so bad for him, so I asked what happened, and apparently the final assignment is an unsolved problem ㅋㅋㅋ

└I sat in on the class and walked right back out. It's real. I thought they were joking at first. The people who actually take that class must be absolute freaks.

└Harvard's in an uproar too. I asked one of my professors about it, and he said if it's Yu Seo-ha, he could totally see him doing that ㅋㅋㅋ

└I heard the Life Matrix class is even worse.... Apparently that place is literally hell on earth.

└I heard the math majors rank each other based on how much of his class they understand? Apparently even the study groups are divided by skill level.

└If someone actually solves Hadwiger's Conjecture for the final, where do they submit the paper? Is an undergrad assignment seriously going to end up in a top journal?

└I'm one of the people who dropped that class, and I regret it every day. Should I try again?

└Yeah, I ran away after the first class too. I still think it was the right decision. But why do I regret it so much? I just can't let it go for some reason.

└Probably because you'd have to admit you were never cut out to be a mathematician.

└Poor guys, unable to appreciate the beauty of Yu-Riemann Geometry ㅋㅋㅋ

└It's way too hard to blame the people who ran away. I kept grinding at it like my life depended on it, and eventually a path opened up. There comes this moment when the professor's explanation just clicks and suddenly you get it. Not saying that happens for everyone, of course.

└Yeah, this'll probably hurt the people who gave up if they read it, but it is what it is. Every other class feels boring now.

Opinions on Seo-ha were sharply divided.

He was a mirror that revealed an individual's limits with almost cruel clarity, while at the same time, to a select few students, he was a once-in-a-lifetime teacher.

Some gave up on their dream of becoming mathematicians after taking his class. Yet there were also many who fell in love with mathematics for the first time because of Seo-ha.

They all had just one thing in common.

None of them could ever return to who they had been before meeting Yu Seo-ha.

Anyone who experienced his lectures even once began looking at mathematics by an entirely different standard.

They were forced to confront, with painful clarity, just how far their talent could take them and how much higher they might still climb.

A wall of talent so stark it was impossible to ignore.

Yet beyond that wall lay a new world visible only to those who refused to give up before it. Seo-ha was teaching his students both how to face their limits and the joy of surpassing them.

***

Professors had a lot to do.

Mountains of administrative work, departmental notices pouring in every week, research fund accounting documents, and papers awaiting his approval piled up like towers across his desk. On top of that, there seemed to be no end to the meetings and seminars a newly appointed professor was expected to attend....

But there was one thing that made all that exhaustion disappear in an instant: the time he spent with his students.

“Professor, there's a logical discontinuity when projecting the high-dimensional curvature onto the complex plane in Lemma 3. Is this an exceptional condition of the Yu-Riemann Matrix?”

Office hours.

Every afternoon, Seo-ha's office was packed with students requesting meetings. These were the real ones who had survived among countless dropouts. Seeing students with bloodshot eyes burning with determination never failed to put Seo-ha in a good mood.

“No. It's not an exception. That part is actually the key. The topology reversing there is evidence that a discontinuous resonance has occurred.”

Seo-ha pulled over a mobile whiteboard and began writing equations.

The look in the student's eyes changed by the second. Whenever someone who had been wandering through a maze finally found the path and their eyes lit up, Seo-ha felt a surge of exhilaration from deep within his chest.

There were people who could understand the beauty of the mathematics he had discovered and be moved by it alongside him.

That unfamiliar joy of being a teacher replenished Seo-ha's exhausted spirit day after day.

Undergraduates were not the only ones who sought him out.

“Professor Yu, do you have a moment? About the Life Matrix No. 7 neural network you presented last time, it doesn't perfectly match the clinical data from our neuroscience institute. Is there any way to mathematically correct the discrepancy?”

Lunchtime.

The moment he sat down in the faculty cafeteria, gray-haired luminaries from other departments would casually slide into the seats beside him and start asking questions.

The legacy Seo-ha had built at MIT since his undergraduate days was enormous. Now that he was a professor, they approached him without hesitation to ask for advice.

Whenever Seo-ha got involved, barriers that had stalled entire fields began to give way. The professors knew that from experience. Their discussions became so intense that they barely noticed what they were eating, but Seo-ha enjoyed even those moments.

Of course, not every part of his daily life could be perfect.

“Huh? Where'd my donut go?”

Inside the office, Seo-ha tilted his head as he searched the refrigerator.

He had made an ambitious plan to make cooking part of his daily routine and eat healthy even when he was away from home.

His resolve had not even lasted two weeks.

“I threw it out.”

Seo-ha flinched at the icy voice from behind him.

“Ellie!”

A rare beauty in the overwhelmingly male environment of MIT.

Ellie, her bright blond hair neatly tied back, glared at Seo-ha with her arms crossed.

“I threw out all the donuts. The chocolate bars, marshmallows, and cookies you hid in the back of your drawers too.”

“Ahh!”

“Wasn't it just last month that you said you needed to improve your diet?”

“My glucose was low, so I couldn't help it. My brain was demanding calories....”

“That's a terrible excuse! Didn't you collapse back when we were undergrads? I didn't know why back then, but now that I've seen what you eat, I understand.”

Ellie sighed.

Seo-ha had nothing to say in his defense. She shook her head and said,

“I put an organic salad in the fridge, so eat that.”

“Okaaay.”

The Teaching Assistants who had been watching the scene with great interest through the gap in the door began whispering among themselves.

“No way! The professor can't even argue back?”

“What's going on between those two?”

“I heard they were classmates as undergrads.”

“Seriously? That explains it....”

Seo-ha's lecture had grown into a mega-class. It was only natural that Ellie became one of his Teaching Assistants.

She had been familiar with Seo-ha's way of thinking since their undergraduate days. On top of that, she was one of the few graduate students who had read Yu Seo-ha's Collected Papers so many times that the cover was worn out, even though the collection itself had faded somewhat from attention over time.

“Um.... Professor, I came because I had a question.”

A student cautiously poked his head through the doorway.

Ellie's brow furrowed.

“Can't you see the professor is busy?”

The students standing in the hallway swallowed nervously under Ellie's fierce glare.

“Ellie, I'm fine....”

“Well, I'm not. You haven't taken a single break since this morning. You're going to make yourself sick at this rate.”

“But the students came all this way. I can't just send them away.”

“I'll handle it.”

Ellie forcibly sat Seo-ha down in his office chair, then led the student outside.

The student suddenly found himself facing Ellie instead.

“What do you want to ask? Tell me.”

He hesitated for a moment before taking a notebook out of his bag. When he flipped it open, the pages were packed with hastily scrawled equations.

“...I tried transforming the energy flow using Yu-Riemann Geometry, but it keeps diverging at the section where it couples with the Riemann Zeta Function. I thought Professor Yu might be able to give me a hint.”

Ellie flipped through the pages, then let out a small sigh.

Slide.

Thud.

A stack of papers came out of a drawer.

It was Yu Seo-ha's Collected Papers, a compilation of the research he had published since his undergraduate days.

“Turn to page 142.”

“What? Ah, yes!”

The student hurriedly flipped through the pages.

“See Lemma 4 at the bottom? This is something you could have solved perfectly well on your own without taking up the professor's time.”

The student's expression changed by the second as he read through the equations.

“...Whoa! You're right! Did he eliminate the transformed critical point through topological cancellation? That's insane!”

“If you understand it, make a copy and take it with you. And from now on, before you knock on that door, get everything in this collection into your head first. Understood?”

“Thank you, sunbae! I'll study it carefully!”

Clutching the collection tightly to his chest, the student repeatedly bowed before running down the hallway.

Ellie smiled faintly as she watched him go.

'We need some kind of system.'

She understood how the students felt.

The more they listened to his lectures, the more unbearable their thirst became, and a single hint from him could suddenly make everything clear. She knew those feelings well. She had experienced them throughout her undergraduate years while chasing after Seo-ha's back.

But if this continued, Seo-ha's body would not hold out.

Slide.

When she opened the door, all the students waiting in the hallway immediately straightened up.

“That's it for today's meetings. If you have an urgent question, come to me or one of the other Teaching Assistants first. If you absolutely need to speak with the professor directly, leave a note with the details and I'll pass it along.”

The students looked dissatisfied.

“But....”

“How far have you gotten through the professor's papers? Do you understand his proof of the Riemann Hypothesis?”

“Not yet.”

“Yu-Riemann Geometry starts from there. Go back and study more.”

Ellie pointed toward the exit.

One by one, the students left with awkward expressions. Ellie remained standing there until the last student disappeared.

She let out a small laugh.

“You guys have no idea how lucky you are. Back in my day, I had to figure everything out by myself.”

The words had slipped out without her even realizing it. The Teaching Assistants nearby flinched and shuddered with appalled expressions.

Ellie opened the office door to give her report.

“Professor, I took care of the students....”

She could not finish her sentence.

Seo-ha was asleep. He was leaning back in his chair, looking exhausted. A painful twinge ran through her chest.

Rustle.

She brought over a blanket and draped it over him, and his face seemed to relax slightly.

“Idiot. Always pushing yourself too hard....”

Ellie quietly returned to her desk, careful not to make a sound. Just as she finally began to catch her breath while sorting through the backlog of paperwork, someone knocked on the door again.

Knock, knock!

Her brow immediately twisted into a frown.

She had made herself perfectly clear, so what clueless student had come back this time?

Slide.

“I clearly said today's meetings were over....”

“....”

She flung the door open, ready to snap at whoever was there, only for her lips to freeze in place.

Standing in the doorway was a silver-haired gentleman dressed in a long black coat. He stood perfectly still with his back straight, looking down at her.

His gaze seemed capable of seeing straight through a person, and his presence was cold and oppressive.

It was almost suffocating. Yet his face was unmistakably familiar.

'Where have I seen him before?'

After a long moment, Ellie finally remembered who he was.

She had seen his name and face countless times in papers and articles since high school. Before Seo-ha appeared, he had been universally regarded as humanity's greatest mind, a towering figure from Princeton, Professor Elijah Cronen.

He asked in a low voice,

“...Is Professor Yu Seo-ha inside?”

“What? Yes! But right now....”

Before Ellie could even finish speaking, he strode toward the professor's office.

*****

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