My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 177 Lessons from Others

The second canteen at USTC was bustling with activity.

It was peak dinner time.

At a dining table near the north window, Chu Ge was idly picking at the shredded meat in a plate of stir-fried green peppers with chopsticks.

"Hey Lu Jia, where's your supermarket receipt?"

Chu Ge pointed with his chopsticks at Lu Jia sitting opposite him and raised his eyebrows.

"It's been a week already, have you added her on QQ yet? Don't tell me you've been sleeping with that instant noodle receipt every night after lights out."

Lu Jia was eating with his head down when he heard this, and his face instantly turned red.

He swallowed the food in his mouth, adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, and his voice was a little strained.

"It's been added; it was approved the day before yesterday."

"Added?"

Chu Ge perked up, no longer picky about the meat, and leaned forward to explore.

"What did you talk about? Did you use your game theory and Nash equilibrium techniques? What was your first message? You couldn't have sent 'Hi classmate, I'm the guy who stuttered next to the holly tree the other day,' could you?"

, 7

Lu Jia put down her chopsticks, her expression becoming somewhat unnatural, her fingers unconsciously picking at the edges of the table.

"Not that many were sent."

Lu Jia's voice grew softer and softer.

"I just sent a smiley face."

Chu Ge was stunned, staring at Lu Jia as if she were an alien. After a long while, he squeezed out a sentence through gritted teeth.

"A smiley face? You spent three days holding back, and all you got was a default yellow smiley face? And then? How did they reply?"

"Didn't reply."

Lu Jia is very honest.

"nonsense!"

Chu Ge slapped his thigh.

"If I were that senior, receiving a smiley face from someone who can't even speak in the middle of the night, I'd be being incredibly lenient by not deleting you. Where's your brain that's always busy with calculus?"

Chen Zhuo, who was sitting next to Lu Jia, remained silent.

On the plate in front of him were a plate of scrambled eggs with tomatoes and a plate of braised pork.

He ate very slowly, chewing each mouthful of rice for a long time before swallowing.

In fact, he couldn't tell whether the tomatoes were sour or sweet today.

Although his self-sight fell on Chu Ge opposite him, the focus deep in his pupils did not converge. In the few minutes that Chu Ge and Lu Jia had been bickering, Chen Zhuo had already re-derived the convergence region of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem three times in his mind.

It's still a dead end.

The integral divergence term at the boundary of that continuous domain is like a tangled mess that can't be untangled, firmly blocking the last link in the logical chain.

The smoothness of calculus completely fails when dealing with discrete matrices with infinitely many nodes; the error term is like a tattered rag dancing wildly in the wind, impossible to hold back.

"Brother Zhuo, you talk to him about it."

Chu Ge turned to look at Chen Zhuo, trying to form an alliance.

"Is this kid hopeless? If it were me, I would have already..."

"7

Chen Zhuo snapped out of his daze.

He slowly swallowed the food in his mouth and picked up a tissue to wipe the corner of his mouth.

He looked at the indignant Chu Ge, a hint of a smile appearing in his eyes, and spoke in a calm tone, as if he were talking about the weather.

"If it were you, you probably wouldn't even get to the first step."

Chen Zhu folded the tissue and casually placed it on the side of the plate.

"After all, you were kicked out of the computer lab by the administrator last week for wearing flip-flops and you even posted abusive comments on the BBS. Even if the senior remembers you, you're still that manic patient who wore flip-flops and typed loudly on the keyboard."

Chu Ge's words came to an abrupt halt.

He stared at Chen Zhuo with wide eyes.

Chen Zhuo still wore that gentle smile that made people feel like they were basking in a spring breeze, his eyes were clear and sincere, and he even thoughtfully pushed Chu Ge's plate towards the center.

"Let's eat. If we keep picking through the stir-fried pork with green peppers, all that'll be left is green peppers."

Lu Jia couldn't help but chuckle.

After holding it in for a long time, Chu Ge pointed at Chen Zhuo's nose.

"Brother Zhuo... you usually look so kind and gentle, how come you always stick your tongue out at people? I'm just being unconventional, okay? Don't you know what the 'relaxation' of a hacker is?"

Chen Zhuo smiled, didn't reply, and picked up his chopsticks again.

Just then, a loud, penetrating voice came from the crowd in the cafeteria aisle.

"Excuse me, please make way! Be careful not to spill the soup!"

Carrying two stacked iron plates, Wang Dayong, like a heavy bulldozer, forcefully squeezed a path through the long line of people getting food.

He wasn't even wearing a coat today, just an old man's shirt, the collar of which was already soaked with sweat.

There was a large, dark stain of engine oil on my forearm.

Da Yong was followed by Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan from the School of Physics.

These two doctoral students, who usually wear glasses and are very polite, were sweating profusely, but their expressions were unusually excited as they squeezed their way through with Da Yong.

"Hey, there's a seat here!"

Da Yong spotted Chen Zhuo and the others at a glance. His eyes lit up, and he strode over, placing the two plates of food piled up like small mountains on the table.

One of the plates was filled to the brim with pork ribs.

"Move over, squeeze in."

Da Yong plopped down next to Chu Ge without any hesitation.

Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan also carried plates and sat down at opposite ends of the table, where an extra chair had been added.

Chu Ge sniffed, immediately leaned back, and looked at Da Yong with a look of disgust.

"Dayong, did you go dig a coal mine or blow up a bunker? The smell on you is so strong it could kill all the flies in the cafeteria. And what's that black stuff on your sleeves?"

Dayong picked up the chopsticks and carelessly wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, only to end up smearing a streak of black ash on his forehead as well.

"What coal mining? This is the smell of a man, you know?"

Dayong grinned, picked up the biggest piece of pork rib, put it in his mouth, and mumbled something indistinctly.

"I spent a few hours in the workshop this afternoon and just finished making the base that Teacher Liu asked me to make."

Chen Zhuo looked up at Da Yong, then at Zhao Peng and Zheng Nan, who were beaming with excitement.

He had met these two doctoral students a few times. They usually looked miserable and tormented by their research projects in the Faculty of Science. It was rare to see them so relaxed today.

"Resolved?"

Chen Zhuo asked softly.

"Resolved!"

Zhao Peng spoke first, pushing up his glasses and looking at Da Yong with genuine arrogance in his eyes.

"You have no idea what a ridiculous thing Dayong did in the workshop today. The problem of the base's precision drift had been bothering Lao Zheng and me for almost a week. We tried all sorts of filtering algorithms, but Dayong fixed it in just one afternoon."

Zhao Peng pointed to the spare ribs on the table.

"This ribs meal is on me today, Dayong. Eat as much as you want, and if you're still hungry, go get some more!"

Chu Ge became interested and even stopped eating.

"What base? Why are you making a base?"

Da Yong smiled憨厚ly, spat out a bone, and waved his hands repeatedly.

"Forget it, what could I possibly solve? I just got lucky."

Dayong picked up the seaweed and egg drop soup next to him, took a big gulp, and sighed contentedly.

"Don't listen to Senior Brother Zhao's nonsense. I've been reading my 'Mechanics of Materials' textbook so many times these past few days that it's practically worn out. All that calculus and thermal stress tensor formulas in there has almost dried up my brain."

As Da Yong said this, a self-deprecating smile appeared on his face.

He looked at Chen Zhuo and Lu Jia.

"I'm not being modest, but you guys can figure out those math problems. I really can't. My brain is too stupid. I get sleepy as soon as I see those winding symbols. I can't figure out how much the iron expands when it's heated."

Dayong put down the soup bowl, gestured with his hands in the air, and said in a tone of helplessness at the unruly nature of the ingredients.

"Think about it, when iron is heated, the atoms inside expand and squeeze haphazardly, completely irrationally. No matter how well you design the external structure, it's just the atoms struggling inside, what can you do?"

Lu Jia adjusted his glasses and listened attentively.

"And then what happened? I can't figure out how it was fixed?" Chu Ge pressed.

"Since I can't figure it out, I might as well just give up."

Da Yong picked up the second piece of pork rib and said nonchalantly.

"If I can't afford to mess with it, can't I at least avoid it? Isn't it going to swell up? So I went to the scrap heap and picked up an aluminum rod, and put it inside that steel pipe."

Dayong put down his chopsticks, stretched out his hands, and squeezed them together tightly in the gaps between the dishes on the table, making a pulling motion in opposite directions.

"The book says that aluminum expands quickly and steel expands slowly, so I just let them expand however they want inside, and let them fight each other however they want."

.

Dayong stared at his two hands, his voice rising slightly with excitement.

"The aluminum pulls downwards, and the steel pushes outwards; the two forces are completely neutralized inside!"

Da Yong let go, picked up the rice bowl, and took a big bite of rice.

"Even though the inside is a complete mess, it's fine. The outermost load-bearing frame is locked in place by this counteracting force; it can't move an inch!"

The cafeteria was still noisy.

Not far away, a few boys were arguing loudly about which internet cafe to go to for an all-nighter.

The auntie was banging on the iron basin at the window, shouting that there was no more sweet and sour fish.

Chu Ge was about to open his mouth to mock Da Yong for using a typical rudimentary method of steelmaking.

Chen Zhuo stopped chewing rice.

He held a piece of braised pork between his chopsticks, hovering it above the plate.

His gaze was originally on Wang Dayong's face, but the moment Dayong said that they were fighting each other, canceling each other out, and the outermost frame was locked tightly.

The focus in Chen Zhuo's eyes had crumbled.

The noise of hundreds of people eating and chatting around him sounded to Chen Zhuo as if a main switch had been suddenly pulled.

The sound receded instantly.

go away.

It turned into a vast expanse of white noise with a slight hum.

In that instant, his brain actively cut off all superfluous perception of the external environment; all computing power and all neurons were diverted to the mathematical maze deep within his consciousness.

In his mind, Dayong's two hands transformed into countless discrete nodes oscillating in a higher-dimensional space.

Aluminum is pulled downwards, steel is pushed outwards.

Positive error, negative error.

The internal variables interact and cancel each other out.

In Chen Zhuo's eyes, this was pure, undisguised algebraic geometry!

That's a closed loop within the synchronization group!

The result of applying the boundary operator to the internal element is zero!

Da Yong said: The outermost frame is locked tight, it can't move even a micrometer.

Yes.

Why bother with the oscillations inside? Why obsess over smoothing out singularities that fail to converge on the boundaries of continuous domains?

So what if calculus fails? So what if the Gauss-Bonnet theorem can't be applied?

We only need to construct a global topological invariant.

Once we find that Betti number.

The framework of discrete topology itself is absolutely conserved!

No matter how infinitely the internal errors diverge, as long as they cancel each other out under the mapping of the homology group, the final global boundary will be completely swallowed up by this topological structure! Completely locked!

There's absolutely no need to prove convergence!

Because it is inherently solid in discrete algebraic space!

A crisp sound.

Chen Zhuo's chopsticks fell straight into the plate, splashing some tomatoes.

The sudden commotion startled Chu Ge, who was about to speak.

Da Yong also stopped chewing, his mouth full of rice, and looked blankly at Chen Zhuo.

Chen Zhuo's breathing became noticeably heavier.

Without looking at anyone, he suddenly reached out his hand.

His hand reached across the plate in front of him and snatched a piece of discarded printing paper that was next to Lu Jia, which was resting against a bone.

There was still a little oil stain on the edge of the paper.

Chen Zhuo didn't care at all.

He held the paper down with his left hand and quickly pulled a black ballpoint pen from his pocket with his right.

There was no setup, no explanation.

Chen Zhuo slumped onto the dining table, his pen tip landing heavily on the blank space of the scrap paper.

The pen tip glided rapidly across the rough paper, and because of the force, the faint tearing sound of the paper being torn could even be heard.

He did not write calculus.

He wrote down a huge boundary operator.

Following this is a dense series of algebraic matrix mapping symbols, and H—n(X) representing the homology group.

Chen Zhuo writes extremely fast.

He didn't even have time to pause and think.

The logical loops that Da Yong had completely opened up in his mind with just one sentence poured onto the paper like a flood breaking through a dam.

Matrix cancellation of positive and negative errors.

Locking of global topological invariants.

The last formula was applied.

Chen Zhuo suddenly paused his wrist and drew a small square on the paper to indicate the end of the proof.

He stopped writing.

The entire process takes no more than thirty seconds.

The people at the table looked at each other, not daring to breathe, and watched him slumped over the table, staring intently at the tattered piece of paper covered with symbols.

one second.

two seconds.

Chen Zhuo's shoulders suddenly twitched slightly.

Chen Zhuo raised his head.

His eyes were frighteningly bright, as if two flames were burning deep within them.

He reached out and grabbed Dayong's broad, sturdy shoulder, shaking it forcefully twice.

"Da Yong".

Chen Zhuo's voice was excited yet incredibly confident.

"This meal you provided was a huge help."

Dayong, with half a piece of pork rib cartilage still in his mouth, was stunned by the sudden movement.

"what?"

Da Yong swallowed the bone with a gulp and stared at Chen Zhuo with wide eyes.

Chen Zhuo did not explain what algebraic topology is, nor did he explain what a homology group is.

He simply withdrew his hand, grabbed the torn piece of paper on the table, carefully folded it in half, and held it tightly in his palm.

He's going to the Department of Mathematics.

We need to go now.

The blackboard in Li Jianming's office will really come in handy tonight.

Da Yong held his chopsticks, staring blankly at Chen Zhuo's disappearing figure through the cafeteria door.

He turned his head, looked at Zhao Peng, and then at Zheng Nan.

"Senior Brother Zhao."

"7

Dayong scratched his messy hair.

"What's wrong with Xiao Zhuo? I even helped out by eating some ribs!"