My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 203 Pierre

Li Jianming hung up the phone.

A deathly silence fell over the office.

Li Jianming sat in the leather chair, as if all his strength had been drained away.

One curse, one retreat, one point of direction.

Three impacts in one day.

These three ceilings, representing the highest level in China, were all decisively shattered by Chen Zhuo's single, incomplete manuscript.

Li Jianming turned his head and looked out the window at the completely dark night sky.

The growth of a genius requires a framework that allows them to grow wildly, not one that is carefully protected.

Since no one in the country can withstand this barbaric axe.

Since Lao Wei pointed out that clue that sank in the late 1990s,

Li Jianming suddenly stood up.

He didn't turn on the overhead light, but used the dim streetlight coming in from the window to pull off his old trench coat, which he had worn for many years, from the coat rack and put it on.

He opened the office door and strode out.

The hallway was empty.

Li Jianming walked down the stairs, his pace quickening.

He left the building of the School of Mathematical Sciences and headed straight for the old library deep inside the USTC campus.

The old library has a basement level with a special collection of foreign language journals that is not open to students. It is filled with various original foreign language periodicals that have been subscribed to since the school was founded, and is perpetually filled with the smell of mothballs used to repel insects and the musty smell of old paper.

Li Jianming walked to the iron door of the special collections room, took out his professor's certificate, and asked the administrator on duty to open the door.

He walked down the dark stairs.

The basement was dimly lit, with rows of tall metal bookshelves arranged like a forest.

Li Jianming walked to the area index sign and quickly scanned it with his light.

"Core foreign language journals in mathematics..."

.I zone.

He walked down the aisle and stopped in front of the third row of bookshelves.

The shelves here are densely packed with stacks of thick, bound periodicals.

Li Jianming found the cell labeled "Inventionesmathematicae".

He crouched down and began searching from the bottom layer.

"1995......1996......1997..."

'

He moved the dusty periodicals out and placed them on the dusty cement floor.

Finally, he pulled out a bound volume from 1998 with a slightly torn cover.

Li Jianming sat cross-legged on the cold ground, placing the bound volume on his knees.

He put on his reading glasses and, by the dim light of the overhead fluorescent lamp, opened the catalog.

No.

He then pulled out the 1999 bound volume.

The book, hundreds of pages thick, is filled with dense English and French text, accompanied by countless obscure mathematical symbols.

Li Jianming turned the pages one by one.

He didn't know the name of the paper; he could only rely on his memory of Chen Zhuo's incomplete manuscript to search for that similar savage atmosphere.

The basement was quiet, with only the rustling of pages turning.

Time passed by, second by second.

Ji Jianming's eyes became dry and sore from staring at the small print for so long, but he didn't stop.

When I turned to a French paper in the fourth issue of 1999.

Li Jianming's hand, which was turning the pages of the book, suddenly stopped.

His gaze was fixed on a line of derivation formulas on the left page.

That is a discrete expression for the dimensionality reduction mapping of topological space.

Although its approach is not exactly the same as Chen Zhuo's, the underlying sense of logical division and the brutal aesthetic of severing continuity at all costs are exactly the same!

The resonance of souls.

Li Jianming even felt a chill creep up his spine.

There really are crazy people like this in this world.

He quickly flipped back to the title page of the paper.

His finger landed on the French spelling of the author's name.

There is no long list of collaborators, only an extremely aloof single name.

"Pierre".

Below the name is a short academic institution suffix:

Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Li Jianming stared at the name.

Old Wei's words echoed in my ears:

That was a small group of radicals, most of whom later disappeared.

But Pierre did not disappear.

Li Jianming knew this name all too well.

The dim incandescent light in the basement shone on the yellowed pages, and at that moment, the long-standing rumors about the international academic circle in Li Jianming's mind pieced together a complete truth like a tide.

This is not some kind of youthful rebellion at all.

He won the Fields Medal in his thirties and became a legend in the fields of topology and algebraic geometry.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Pierre was in his forties and at the absolute peak of a mathematician's intellect, physical strength, and authority, he found classical continuous topology too lukewarm and too boring.

Thus, this tyrant sitting on the Princeton throne personally took charge and devised this heretical theory of discrete truncation and brute force splicing.

He grabbed a savage axe and started smashing things wildly in the exquisite porcelain shop.

The young geniuses who followed him to learn this method at the time, lacking his terrifying mathematical intuition, all suffered logical breakdowns when they delved deeper into the deductions. Some even had their moral compass shattered and withdrew from academia as a result.

The mainstream schools of thought seized the opportunity to launch a concerted attack.

During that storm, Pierre discovered that, apart from himself, there was no one in the world who could keep up with his train of thought, nor could anyone fill the logical abyss that he had violently cleaved open.

The extreme loneliness and disdain he felt for the world being full of ordinary people made him too lazy to argue with the academic community anymore.

Li Jianming's self-illustration scrolled down the author column and landed on the main text of this paper published in 1999.

His French reading ability was sufficient for him to understand this article, which had no collaborators whatsoever.

This is not an exploratory paper.

This was Pierre's final summary of the brutal framework he had built up when he was sixty years old, and it was also his last work.

There is no trace of the humility a mathematician displays when exploring the truth.

The entire piece is filled with sarcasm and condescension.

In the conclusion of the article, Pierre wrote a passage in extremely detached French, which Li Jianming automatically translated into Chinese in his mind: "I have laid out all the discrete tools for dealing with singularities and topological tears here, but unfortunately, the current academic generation lacks the intuition to navigate such boundaries. Since no one dares to use them, nor is anyone qualified to use them, let this method remain on these few pages."

Li Jianming's chest heaved slightly as he read these words.

Pierre left this cursed sword at the age of sixty, treating it as a tombstone mocking the entire era, believing that no one would ever be able to pull it out.

From then on, this old madman completely transformed into an academic judge who sat in his office drinking red tea, reading mediocre papers, and finding the whole world boring.

but.

Li Jianming unconsciously scratched at the cold ground with his fingers.

That tyrant on the other side of the ocean could never have imagined that five years later...

In a provincial capital city in the heart of China.

A thirteen-year-old boy, a junior in college, who might not even know who Pierre is.

Not only did he casually pull out the demonic sword he left behind, but he also used this sword to reach the highest holy grail of world mathematics.

On the base of Hodge's conjecture, an extremely ingenious starting gesture is engraved.

Li Jianming closed the thick bound volume of the journal.

A loud bang echoed through the empty underground special collection room, stirring up a cloud of dust.

He leaned on the rusty tin bookshelf and slowly stood up.

His knees were stiff from sitting cross-legged on the cold ground for so long, and his legs felt numb and sore as if they were being pricked by countless needles.

It took him a while to slowly and unsteadily put the 1998 bound volume back in its place.

He turned around and went up the dark, narrow staircase.

Pushing open the heavy glass doors of the old library, the cold wind of a late November night rushed towards me.

A few dry sycamore leaves were carried by the wind, making a rustling sound as they blew across the road.

Li Jianming turned up the collar of his old trench coat, put his hands in his pockets, and walked along the familiar path on campus toward the School of Mathematics building.

As night deepened, the glow of the streetlights appeared somewhat bleak.

Occasionally, one or two stray cats would dart out from the bushes and quickly disappear into the darkness.

The person has been found.

But the weight on Li Jianming's mind didn't lift; instead, it became even heavier.

How can I contact Pierre?

This is the most fatal dead end he faces.

Send an email across the ocean? Or make an overseas phone call to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton?

Li Jianming shook his head in the cold wind.

Absolutely not.

Pierre was too lonely and longed for his own kind.

If that old madman were to see Chen Zhuo's draft, to see that someone in the world could finally follow his train of thought, he would pounce on him like a shark smelling blood.

What will happen then?

Princeton will send you the highest level of invitation directly.

Full scholarship, green card, world-class laboratory resources, and a living allowance of tens or hundreds of thousands of US dollars per year.

Pierre himself might even land in Zeyang City in his private jet to snatch him away.

Chen Zhuo was only thirteen years old.

His parents were just ordinary state-owned factory workers.

Faced with that level of academic tycoon and overwhelming resources, what can an ordinary Chinese family do to resist? And what can USTC use to retain its students?

Li Jianming had seen too much.

He taught at this school for decades and saw too many exceptionally talented students poached by prestigious foreign universities with lucrative offers, changing their nationality and becoming high-end cogs in the Western academic assembly line, never to return.

Chen Zhuo is different.

Chen Zhuo is the kind of person who only appears once every few decades or even centuries, a person who can truly shoulder the backbone of a country's basic science.

He must put down roots in the country, and even if he goes abroad for exchanges in the future, his roots must remain in China.

Li Jianming gritted his teeth, his jaw muscles tensing.

No written evidence should be left that can be traced back to HKUST or Chen Zhuo.

You cannot send emails or faxes.

I must see Pierre in person.

Only by facing him face-to-face can one test the depth and character of this old madman without revealing Chen Zhuo's identity.

But where should we meet?

It takes at least half a month to get a US visa, and the approval process is quite complicated.

Chen Zhuo's academic inspiration is extremely valuable. The sparks that fly on the blackboard will quickly be worn away in the daily grind if the foundation is not solidified while it is still hot.

There is simply not enough time.

Li Jianming walked all the way back to the School of Mathematics.

The hallway was quiet, with only the echoing sound of his leather shoes.

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