My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 201 Unwilling

At 7:00 AM, at the School of Mathematics, USTC.

Wu Tao walked up the stairs, his footsteps echoing long in the empty corridor.

The jacket he wore yesterday had several wrinkles from sleeping on the table for a while.

He was holding a stack of A4 papers in his right hand.

It has twenty-two pages in total.

This was a clean draft that he had copied out after staying up all night, carefully checking each stroke and character of the cursive script on the blackboard, and completing it.

Wu Tao walked to the office door at the end of the corridor, raised his hand, and knocked on the door with his knuckles.

"Enter."

Li Jianming's voice came from inside the door, a little hoarse.

Wu Tao pushed open the door.

The overhead light in the office was off; only the old-fashioned, eye-protecting desk lamp on the desk was lit. Li Jianming sat behind the desk, wearing a gray vest and holding an enamel mug in his hand.

It seems the old professor also didn't get much sleep all night.

Wu Tao walked over and gently placed the stack of A4 papers, still warm from the printer, on the desk.

"Teacher, I've figured it out."

Wu Tao's voice was very soft, as if he was afraid of disturbing the symbols on the paper.

"I looked up the information and filled in the whole process where there were skipped steps in the middle. I went through the discrete matrix on the first page and the algebraic loop closure on the last page three times."

Li Jianming put down his teacup and his gaze fell on the top page of the paper.

"Are there any logical gaps?" Li Jianming asked.

Wu Tao shook his head, his movements very slow.

"No, it fits perfectly."

Wu Tao paused for a moment, seemingly organizing his thoughts.

"Chen Zhuo's cut in the middle seemed unreasonable, but later on, all the boundaries aligned perfectly, and the logic made sense."

Li Jianming nodded and reached out to press his hand on the stack of papers.

"Alright, go back to your dorm and get some sleep. You don't need to come to the campus today."

Wu Tao glanced at the draft on the table, then at his mentor.

"Teacher, if this thing is really pushed down..."

Go to sleep.

Li Jianming interrupted him, his tone not harsh, but leaving no room for negotiation.

"From now on, keep this to yourself and don't mention it to anyone."

Wu Tao shut his mouth, nodded, turned and walked out of the office, closing the door behind him.

Li Jianming sat in the chair, listening to Wu Tao's footsteps gradually fade away until the corridor was completely quiet again.

He stood up, walked to the door, and reached out to turn the lock.

A crisp click of the lock.

Then, he walked to the sofa against the wall, bent down, and unplugged the telephone line from the wall socket.

After finishing all this, Li Jianming walked back to his desk and sat down.

The office has now become an isolated island completely cut off from the outside world.

Li Jianming took a deep breath, pulled the stack of drafts on the table in front of him, and opened the first page.

He didn't pick up a pen immediately, but instead read through the pages one by one.

Yesterday, there was a high-intensity clash of ideas between the two of us on the blackboard. Now, looking at this complete derivation in a calmer state, the visual impact has become even clearer.

This is a gap that was forcibly torn open in the topological space by brute force.

Chen Zhuo's approach was like that of a lumberjack with an axe, who completely disregarded the grain of the tree, chopped it down with one swing of the axe, and then forcibly nailed the two pieces of wood together with iron nails.

But, this tree survived.

Li Jianming turned to the last page of the draft, looked at the closed equal sign, and put the paper down.

He took off his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

He is an old-fashioned scholar at heart.

He studied the most orthodox classical algebraic geometry, which emphasizes smoothness, continuity, and the natural extension of logic.

Chen Zhuo's unorthodox approach may be a miracle in engineering, but it appears too crude in the context of pure mathematical aesthetics.

More importantly, Chen Zhuo has only created a prototype so far.

To delve deeper into this gap and touch the true core of the Hodge conjecture, we can no longer rely on brute force like chopping down a tree with an axe. We must have a rigorous, self-consistent algebraic theory to support this barbaric logic.

Who will build this theory for him?

Li Jianming looked out the window at the sky gradually brightening.

He was Chen Zhuo's teacher.

On Chinese soil, in this office at the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China, he felt it was his inescapable responsibility.

He stood up and walked to the row of large bookshelves against the wall.

The glass door of the bookcase was a little stiff, so he pulled it open with force.

He ignored the usual textbooks on the outside and reached directly to the back of the bookshelf, taking out the thick, heavy volumes one by one.

Zalisky's commutative algebra, Weil's foundations of algebraic geometry, and a thick stack of hard-covered handwritten notes he made in his early years of research.

The pages of these books are yellowed and have a musty smell, as if they haven't seen sunlight for a long time.

Li Jianming piled all the books on his desk, taking up most of the surface.

He put his reading glasses back on, took a stack of blank draft paper from the drawer, and removed the cap from his fountain pen.

He wanted to use his life's accumulated knowledge of classical algebra to pave the way little by little on the rough fault line that Chen Zhuo had cut out.

He wanted to build a sturdy bridge for his student so that he could cross it safely.

The pen tip landed on the paper, making a soft scratching sound.

The initial derivation went smoothly.

Using his familiar theory of algebraic varieties, Li Jianming began to redefine the singularity left by Chen Zhuo.

He attempted to use a blowing method to expand the collapsed dimension back up, restoring it to a smooth complex manifold.

The pen moved quickly across the paper.

The first draft paper was filled with writing.

He casually put it aside and pulled over the second one.

Time slowly slipped away amidst the scratching of the pen tip, and the sun rose higher outside the window, its rays streaming through the glass onto the floor.

Occasionally, the sound of school bells and students walking could be heard in the corridor, but they were all blocked out by the heavy door.

Around noon, Li Jianming put down his pen.

He looked at the formula on the paper, which was only half-derived, and his brows slowly furrowed.

wrong.

Using the blowing method to deal with singularities does work locally; the dimensions are re-expanded, and the space becomes smooth.

However, when he tried to put this smoothed local area back into the grand algebraic loop constructed by Chen Zhuo, a contradiction arose.

Smoothing disrupts the original homology correspondence.

The originally perfectly fitted boundary was completely misaligned because of this seemingly neat repair.

Li Jianming picked up his enamel mug and took a sip of water.

The tea had long since gone cold, and a bitter taste lingered in my mouth.

He pulled out the draft paper filled with instructions on how to blow the air, looked at it for a while, and then drew a big X on it.

This approach won't work.

He crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper basket at his feet.

Li Jianming opened a thick foreign language reference book next to him and began to search for another classic intersection theory.

He didn't want to give up.

He is a proud man.

He went abroad to study and returned home. He has sat in this office for decades, mentoring batch after batch of students.

He firmly believed that although the soil for mathematics in China was not fertile enough, as long as one was willing to put in the hard work, a towering tree could eventually be grown.

Now, he sees that the seeds have sprouted.

He refused to admit that his land could not support this tree.

The afternoon sun began to slant westward.

The only sounds in the office were the scratching of pens and the occasional turning of pages.

Li Jianming didn't even eat lunch.

There was a knock on the door, it seemed to be an officer from the institute delivering documents, but he didn't respond. The person knocked twice and then left.

The pile of draft paper on the table kept getting higher and higher.

Li Jianming's movements no longer carried the same composure as in the morning.

His writing speed varies, sometimes fast and sometimes slow.

Sometimes I write down a long string of equations, and sometimes I hold the pen in mid-air and stare at the paper for more than ten minutes.

"We can't get through here..."

99

He muttered something under his breath.

He attempted to replace Chen Zhuo's discrete truncation with the linear equivalence of algebraic closed chains.

This is the safest method in classical algebraic geometry.

He wrote four whole pages to prove this equivalence.

However, when the limit value of the last step was calculated, Li Jianming's hand stopped.

It's diverged.

In the continuous domain, the infinite term that Chen Zhuo had originally severed with a single stroke inevitably reappeared because he was trying to maintain the continuity of space, directly collapsing the entire equation.

Li Jianming's hands were trembling slightly.

He held those few pages of paper, his fingers trembling slightly.

"Sizzle."

He tore the four pages in half, crumpled them into a ball, and slammed them into the wastebasket.

The crumpled paper hit the edge of the wastebasket, bounced, and rolled into the corner of the bookcase.

Li Jianming leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

He felt a weariness that came from within, not physical exhaustion, but a deep sense of powerlessness.

He doesn't believe in superstitions.

He pushed the books off the table and pulled over a blank sheet of paper.

There must be a way.

There must be a way to fill that gap using the knowledge he has acquired.

The sun has completely set.

The office was dimly lit.

Li Jianming didn't turn on the overhead light; he simply continued writing on the paper by the light emanating from the table lamp.

The fountain pen ran out of ink.

He unscrewed the pen, took out a bottle of ink from the drawer, filled it, and continued writing.

Late at night.

The campus of USTC became quiet, with the occasional breeze blowing the branches outside the window and scraping against the glass.

Li Jianming's breathing became heavy.

His gray vest was already damp with sweat, sticking to his back and making one feel cold.

He stared at the last line of equations on the paper.

This was the last tool he could think of for dealing with singularities in classical algebraic geometry.

He included all the conditions in the equation.

The pen tip stopped on the paper.

There was no need to calculate any further; with his decades of experience, he could see the outcome of this equation at a glance.

dead end.

No matter how he twists and turns, no matter how exquisite his classical techniques are, as long as he wants to maintain the order and continuity of mathematics, he will inevitably disrupt the inherent balance of Chen Zhuo's prototype.

Chen Zhuo's thinking is not within the framework of classical algebra at all.

His savage cutting was an instinctive call for higher-dimensional modern mathematical tools.

Li Jianming did not have those tools.

It wasn't on his bookshelf, nor in his mind.

"Smack."

The pen slipped from his hand, fell onto the table, rolled a few times, and came to rest next to a book by Zarisch.

Li Jianming slowly leaned his head back in the chair.

He turned his head and looked at his feet.

The wastebasket that was once empty is now overflowing with crumpled draft paper, and there are even a few crumpled pieces of paper scattered on the ground.

This is the result of his relentless effort over the past day and night.

A crushing defeat.

Li Jianming looked at the crumpled pieces of paper, and his eyes slowly began to well up with tears.

He wasn't distressed about his physical strength, nor was he discouraged.

He only felt pain.

This kind of pain is like an old teacher seeing a peerless gem, only to find that the carving knife in his hand is all dull.

He wanted to keep Chen Zhuo by his side, to teach him personally, and to watch this tree grow tall in his yard.

But this was just wishful thinking on his part.

He had to admit a cruel truth.

His knowledge system is too outdated.

The classical, conventional methods he insisted on proved powerless when dealing with problems that touched the ceiling of human intelligence.

If he insists on keeping Chen Zhuo in his own system and paves the way for him.

That's not helping him; that's forcing him to conform.

It was a rusty iron lock that bound the bird that could have flown much higher.

Li Jianming reached out and closed the thick, open reference book on the table.

It made a dull sound.

He sat under the dim lamplight, looking at the twenty-two-page draft that belonged to Chen Zhuo on the table.

"My pool is too shallow."

Li Jianming's voice rang out in the quiet office, hoarse with a sense of resignation.

"I can't teach him."

He slowly stood up and walked to the window.

Outside the window is the tranquil night view of the USTC campus, with the lights of the dormitory buildings twinkling in the distance.

He stood there for a long time.

The night breeze seeped in through the cracks in the window and blew on his face, gradually calming his feverish mind.

Protecting one's own offspring should not lead to killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Since I can't teach it myself, and since my old team can't handle it.

Then we have no choice but to look outside.

Find someone who can catch this savage axe.

Li Jianming turned around and walked back to his desk.

He swept all the scattered draft papers on the table into the wastepaper basket, and moved the heavy volumes back to the bookshelf one by one, arranging them in their original positions.

Finally, he picked up Chen Zhuo's draft.

He extracted the first few pages of the draft, showing the derivation process, and then extracted the page that led to the final conclusion.

Only the two most crucial pieces of paper, concerning discrete truncation, remain.

He folded the two pieces of paper in half and put them into the briefcase next to him.

He turned off the desk lamp switch, plunging the office into darkness.

The door lock made a turning sound.

Li Jianming carried his briefcase and walked out of the office. The motion-sensor lights in the corridor turned on, illuminating his slightly hunched but still determined back.