My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 209 The Strange Old Man

After walking for about ten minutes, the old library came into view.

The red brick wall was covered with withered yellow ivy vines, and the wooden double doors were somewhat faded, with an old wooden sign hanging above the door.

There were no modern electronic screens, nor noisy crowds.

Pierre pushed open the half-closed wooden door and went inside.

A familiar musty smell of old paper mixed with the scent of mothballs wafted over me.

On the first floor was a lending desk and several rows of old bookshelves, where a librarian wearing reading glasses was sitting, looking down at a newspaper.

Pierre didn't bother the caretaker; he tiptoed up the somewhat old stairs.

The stairs made a faint creaking sound.

The sound made him feel at ease.

In Princeton, the corridors of the Institute for Advanced Study are covered with thick carpets, so quiet that even the sound of footsteps is absorbed, creating a sense of oppressive silence. But this quietness is warm.

He went up to the second floor, and then up the stairs to the third floor.

The third floor is an open-plan reading room.

Light streamed in through the tall, old-fashioned wooden lattice windows, and fine dust particles could be seen swirling in the air.

Several rows of long wooden tables were neatly arranged.

Since it was during class time, the reading room was almost empty, with only a few people sitting in different corners reading.

Pierre stood at the top of the stairs, as the sunlight slowly swept across the reading room.

He was looking for that stubborn old man with white hair and wearing old clothes.

But after scanning around, apart from two college students looking down at their postgraduate entrance exam materials, he didn't see anyone who met the requirements.

He remembered what the boy had said earlier, about the corner on the third floor.

He slowed his pace and walked along the farthest passageway.

Walk all the way to the innermost corner by the window.

There is a table there.

Two people were sitting on either side of the table.

On the left is a girl wearing a white sweater, with her hair in a ponytail, head down, quietly taking notes in a textbook.

On the right, there was a boy sitting.

He was wearing a very simple jacket, the zipper was not zipped up, and underneath he was wearing an ordinary white T-shirt.

Judging from his appearance, he looks to be no more than thirteen or fourteen years old.

The boy's hair was a little long and hadn't been styled; it lay softly on his forehead.

Two thick foreign language books, each as thick as a brick, were spread out on the table.

The boy was lying on the table, holding the cap of a pen in one hand and unconsciously biting it, his brows slightly furrowed as he stared at a large sheet of draft paper in front of him.

Pierre stopped in his tracks.

He was standing less than three meters away from the table.

There were no old men.

There are no hermits.

There were only two children studying on their own.

Pierre figured that the boy named Wu Tao must have pointed to the wrong place, or that he had misunderstood the Chinese directions.

Out of a sense of elder's respect, he decided to go over and ask the two children.

He stepped out with his left foot and silently walked to the boy's diagonal rear.

He leaned down slightly, ready to speak in English.

"Excuse me, children, is there someone here..."

'

The words hadn't even left his mouth.

Pierre's gaze followed the tip of the pen in the boy's hand and inadvertently fell on the open draft paper.

His voice was cut off instantly by an extremely sharp scalpel, stuck tightly in his throat.

The air seemed to freeze at that moment.

Pierre's deep blue pupils contracted sharply to their limit in an instant.

In the center of the draft paper.

This is not a geometry problem for junior high school students.

Calculus is not for university students.

That is a transformation formula for a set of discrete matrices.

Below the transformation formula is an X representing dimensional collapse, and next to that X is written a formula for dimensionality reduction homomorphism in extremely smooth, even somewhat casual handwriting.

That was the same barbaric, brutal, unreasonable, yet perfectly self-consistent method he had seen in the manuscript in the Journal of Mathematics!

There was no prior preparation, no gentle transition.

This solid cut tears apart the continuous topological space, and then forcibly aligns the boundaries locally.

Pierre felt his breathing stop.

He stared intently at the draft paper.

The boy gently touched the paper with his pen, leaving a few small black dots on the surface.

The boy seemed to be in some kind of trouble.

He put down his pen and reached out to open the thick book next to him.

Pierre's gaze mechanically followed the movement.

It was a French original copy of "Foundations of Algebraic Geometry," its pages yellowed, clearly quite old.

The boy turned to the chapter about the number of intersections of algebraic varieties.

He lowered his head, his fingers tracing the basic axioms and inferences on the pages of the book. His lips moved slightly, as if he were struggling to fit these classical, orderly frameworks into the barbaric truncated text he had just written.

He was trying to use basic tools to explain the intuitive strike he made.

He encountered a wall.

He didn't know how to completely encapsulate that singularity using algebraic loops because his knowledge base wasn't at that level yet.

The boy sighed.

He scratched his head in frustration, picked up a pen, drew a horizontal line under the mapping formula, and put a question mark on it.

"Something is still missing."

The boy muttered a sentence in Chinese.

Pierre was standing there.

Not moving at all.

There was no anger.

There was no roaring.

Even the aura of an academic giant that he usually maintained vanished in an instant.

A suffocating silence descended upon a corner on the third floor of the old library.

Only the wind outside the window rustled softly through the ivy.

Pierre felt as if a silent nuclear explosion was happening in his brain.

All the knowledge he had accumulated throughout his life about academics, genius, and mathematical principles was shattered at that moment, like a fragile piece of glass being smashed to pieces by a hammer.

He thought that the person who could write such an article was an old man who had experienced countless vicissitudes, seen through the decay of classical mathematics, and was rebuilding rules from ruins.

He thought that the other person was an old confidant who, like himself, felt lonely at the top of the mountain and therefore deliberately used such a crude way to mock the world.

But now.

What did he see?

A child who is thirteen or fourteen years old.

This beginner didn't even know what the line of formula he wrote intuitively meant in today's topology community.

Perhaps he simply felt that this path was passable, so he picked up the rusty saw and chopped down without hesitation.

He was twirling that heavy sword, powerful enough to cleave through the ages, in his hands like a toy.

He wasn't breaking the rules.

He doesn't understand the rules at all!

Pierre's hands were behind his back, and his fingers began to tremble slightly uncontrollably.

He looked at the back of the boy's head and his somewhat thin back.

fear.

Yes, at that moment, the 65-year-old Fields Medal winner felt a fear that came from the depths of his soul.

This is an instinctive reaction of mortals when they witness a miracle.

Mathematics is about logic and accumulation.

Brick by brick, slowly building upwards.

But the child in front of me didn't lay any bricks.

He jumped straight into the air, drew a roof out of thin air, and is now lying on the ground in distress, trying to find some pillars to support the roof.

This is unreasonable.

This is a crushing defeat for all the scholars who have struggled and toiled away outside the gates of mathematics, their hair turning white with age.

Pierre slowly closed his eyes.

He opened his eyes again.

The boy remained slumped over the table, his pen scribbling unconsciously across the paper.

The girl next to him turned her head, glanced at the boy, and asked softly.

"Stuck again?"

"Um."

Chen Zhuo nodded, his voice gentle.

"The tools in the book are too old and won't fit. If you try to force them on, the edges will fall apart."

"Don't rush, take your time."

The girl offered a soft word of comfort and continued reading.

Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair.

He raised his head and stretched his slightly sore neck.

At that moment, he sensed that someone was standing behind him.

Chen Zhuo turned his head.

He saw an old foreign man.

He was wearing a light gray jacket, his hair was somewhat gray, and he had a high nose bridge.

The old man stood less than half a meter away from him, his deep blue eyes fixed on the draft paper on his desk, his expression frozen in an extremely strange stiffness.

Chen Zhuo was taken aback.

He glanced at the old man, then followed the old man's gaze to look at his own draft paper.

"Hello?"

Out of politeness, Chen Zhuo greeted him softly in English.

Are you looking for someone?

Pierre heard the boy's voice.

Crisp, clean, with the peace unique to young people.

Pierre slowly shifted his gaze from the draft paper to Chen Zhuo's face.

He opened his mouth.

His Adam's apple bobbed up and down.

He was trying to regain his fluent English or elegant French.

He wanted to ask.

Are you C. Zhuo?

But he found his throat was dry and tight, and his vocal cords felt like they were locked by something, so he couldn't make a sound.

He just stared straight at Chen Zhuo.

Looking into those eyes, so clear and pure, without a trace of impurity.

Chen Zhuo was somewhat puzzled by the old man's gaze.

He turned around, sat down in the chair, and looked at the other person with some concern.

"Are you okay, sir? Do you need any help?"

Pierre remained silent.

His hands slowly came down from behind his back and hung at his sides.

Then, to Chen Zhuo's somewhat astonished gaze...

This academic tyrant, who was unbridled in the international mathematics community and showed no respect to countless top scholars, slowly and stiffly took a step back.

The sole of the shoe rubbed against the floor, making a soft sound.

He did not answer Chen Zhuo's question.

He was like a lost traveler who had accidentally wandered into forbidden territory, and suddenly saw some kind of monster that shouldn't exist in the human world, and subconsciously chose to retreat.

Then, the stiffness quickly faded, replaced by an extremely bright, even scorching, light in his eyes.

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