My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 212 Reaction

Trinity College, Cambridge University.

The fog in November was thick, creeping up the River Cam, damp and cold, clinging to the cracks in the centuries-old stone walls.

When the wooden door to the faculty and staff lounge was pushed open, a blast of cold, damp air wafted in.

Professor Gray took off his scarf and hung it on the coat rack by the door. He was old, and his knuckles were deformed from years of rheumatism, so the movement of unbuttoning his overcoat was slow and laborious.

"Did I receive any mail today?" Gray asked.

Miller, who was flipping through a newspaper by the fireplace, looked up and pointed to the round wooden table by the window.

"There was a newly arrived copy of the Annals of Mathematics, and a few invitations from Bonn that looked like academic conference invitations."

Gray walked over and sat down in the armchair by the window.

Several unopened journals were piled on the wooden table, the top one being the latest issue of the "Annals of Mathematics," the autumn 2004 edition.

Gray picked up the paper cutter on the table and cut along the edge of the seal.

He flipped directly to the table of contents.

My eyes scanned quickly through the dense, incantation-like headings, finally settling on the third-to-last line.

Discrete Mapping and Singularity Convergence in Large-Scale Network Topologies

First author: C. Zhuo.

Second author: W. Tao.

Corresponding author: L. Jianming.

Institution: China University of Science and Technology.

Gray turned to the first page of the text.

Then, he felt as if he had seen something that shouldn't exist.

The lounge was quiet. A crow landed on a bare branch outside the window, tilting its head to look into the room.

The freshly poured black tea in front of Gray was steaming, the wisps of steam rising gracefully, but his hand was tightly gripping the Mathematical Journal, and he didn't touch the cup even once.

His gaze was fixed on the three-line introduction.

The text was neatly formatted, yet it exuded a chilling indifference that sent shivers down one's spine.

The first line points out the inevitable collapse of continuity in infinite-dimensional networks.

The second line states the philosophical paradox of local chaos and global conservation in discrete topological spaces.

The third line gives the paper's final verdict: the absolute dominance of algebraic invariants over geometric divergences.

Gray's eyelids twitched violently.

He was all too familiar with that tone.

This undisguised coldness, this arrogance that disregards existing geometric rules, this writing style that doesn't even bother to give the reader a little bit of transitional background.

same.

He turned to the second page.

It was a densely packed matrix, and the dividing points of each matrix were chosen with extreme cunning.

Those cuts were like a scalpel of almost cruel precision, slicing across those network collapse singularities that were originally considered insurmountable.

There is no mild homomorphism.

There are no cumbersome references to topological axioms.

Only this kind of violent, almost barbaric, logical division.

Gray felt his hands getting cold, and his rheumatic joints started to crack faintly.

He thought of 1999.

At that time, he was attending a seminar in Princeton.

In that conference room filled with oak bookshelves, where even the air seemed to thicken with intellectual pressure, a gray-haired man stood in front of the blackboard.

The man also wielded an axe called discrete algebra, which nearly shattered the very foundation of the continuous geometry school.

At that time, the man's name was Pierre.

Miller.

Gray's voice sounded a little hoarse, as if he had swallowed a handful of dry sand.

Miller didn't hear him clearly and continued flipping through the newspaper about the rowing race.

"What's wrong?"

"Go and dig out that internal briefing from Princeton in 1999, Volume 3, the one about topological tearing, right now."

Gray's voice was trembling.

Miller paused for a moment, finally sensing that something was wrong. He put down his newspaper, walked over, and looked at the magazine in Gray's hand.

"What...what is this?"

Miller frowned as he looked at the pages of formulas that resembled a dense wire mesh.

"Li Jianming? Who's that? And who is this C. Zhuo?"

"This is the axe."

Gray pointed to the line about the derivation of infinite-dimensional mappings.

"Look here, Miller, this unreasonable truncation, this violent logic that completely disregards geometric continuity... No one in this world, except Pierre, would dare to cut like this."

"But Pierre has stopped writing for many years."

Miller bent down and stared at the name.

"Few people in the world can understand his last paper on mapping. He wrote in French at the end that if future generations do not have that kind of intuition, this tool will be a self-destructive poison."

"But now the poison has been drunk by someone, and that person is still alive and well."

Gray stared at the name C. Zhuo.

"Who is this first author? Li Jianming's student? Or some lunatic he found in China?"

Gray suddenly stood up.

He ignored his still-damp scarf and strode towards the black telephone in the corner of the lounge.

His movements were a bit hurried, and he bumped into the corner of the table, spilling the black tea and forming a dark red stain.

He made a phone call.

The phone rang for a long time, the static echoing in the receiver, until it was finally answered.

"Durant? It's me, Gray."

Gray stared out the window at the thick fog, the distant Cambridge Bridge appearing as blurry as a ghost.

"Have you received this issue of the yearbook? Have you read it?"

There was a full five seconds of silence on the other end of the phone.

Durand's voice came from Paris, carrying an uncontrollable sense of terror.

"I'm watching, Gray. I just spilled my coffee on my pants, but I don't have time to wipe it off right now."

It was afternoon at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where Durand was studying.

"He's back, isn't he?"

Durand asked in a low voice on the phone.

"No, it's not him. The author's name is C. Zhuo, from Huazhong University of Science and Technology."

"That is his successor, or his ghost."

Durand's voice rose a few decibels, tinged with a nervous tremor.

"This kind of bloody stench, this logic that tramples on continuity... no one but a devil trained by that tyrant would write like this."

Gray gripped the phone tightly.

"What are you worried about?"

"I fear the nightmare of 1999 will repeat itself, Gray! Do you remember that genius in Zurich back then? The young man who tried to prove to Pierre that continuity was unshakeable."

His medical reports are still in my drawer. Pierre's stuff would ruin a mathematician's intuition!

Durand was breathing heavily on the phone.

"Gray, this paper deals with large-scale networks. If this kind of discrete decision is accepted by the academic community, then all the network manifolds and dynamic mappings we've been working on for the past thirty years will have become meaningless accumulations. He's tearing down our house."

Gray looked at the young doctoral students in the lounge who were quietly reading, completely unaware of the storm.

He recalled those geniuses who suffered cognitive impairment because they couldn't keep up with Pierre's logic.

That kind of logical discontinuity, that kind of high-dimensional reduction attack, is fatal to the fragile academic ecosystem.

"We can't let him come out like this."

Gray said in a low voice, his tone carrying a hint of cold resolve.

"What do you want to do?"

"The introduction to this paper is too arrogant. It lacks the most basic academic humility. It doesn't even cite any of the achievements we've made in the field over the past decade. We can launch a joint letter to the editorial board of the Yearbook to complain and demand a reassessment of the paper's logical rigor. If the first author is an unidentified young man, we have reason to suspect that this is academic opportunism."

"Grey, are you going to provoke that tyrant?"

"No, Durand, I'm protecting mathematics, the normal kind of mathematics that we can understand."

Gray hung up the phone.

At the same time.

Moscow State University, Lenin Hills.

Professor Wolfkov sat in his office, which was piled high with old books and even had some mold in the corners.

Large snowflakes fell outside the window, partially obscuring the spire of this ancient university.

He was holding a copy of the "Annals of Mathematics," which his student had placed on his desk that morning.

Wolfkov didn't bother to read the gossip of those old professors.

He only stared at the conclusion on the last page.

His index finger gently rubbed the solid black square symbol, the judgment left by Chen Zhuo.

"They actually managed to stop it."

Wolfkov muttered to himself.

He pulled open the heavy drawer, inside which was an old, yellowed photograph.

That was a group photo taken when Pierre was young during a visit to Moscow. The man in the photo had a pair of arrogant blue eyes that could burn you.

Wolfkov picked up the vodka on the table, took a sip, and the strong liquor burned his throat.

"Old buddy, you've finally found someone who can wield your axe?"

The computer on the table made a "ding" sound.

Listserv mailing list notifications.

Dozens of messages have already appeared on the topic page, each with an exclamation mark.

Questions about logical breaks in C. Zhuo's paper.

Who is C. Zhuo? A background investigation of the research group at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

"Jointly signed book: Defending the orthodox status of continuous geometry".

Wolfkov looked at the constantly flashing headlines filled with anxiety and fear, and gave a cold laugh.

These old guys spent their entire lives hiding during Pierre's prime, and now that Pierre is old and a new face has emerged, they can't wait to take a bite out of him, just to prove that they haven't been abandoned by the times.

He typed a line of text and sent it to the group: "If you can't understand the matrix cutting on page 12 about discrete mappings, then you're all too old to retire."

"He made it very clear in the third line of his introduction that it is the absolute dominance of algebra, and you are trembling simply because your self-esteem is collapsing along with those continuous curves."

Press the Enter key.

Vovkov stood up, walked to the window, and looked at the heavy snow falling over Moscow.

Bonn, Germany, Institute of Mathematics.

Professor Schmidt was walking briskly down the corridor, holding a printed draft in his hand.

He held a draft of a joint letter in his hand, a first draft sent by email from London.

He knocked on the director's office door.

"They want to sign a joint statement, do we need to sign it?" Schmidt asked.

The director was a chubby old man, staring blankly at the PDF file he had just downloaded on the computer screen.

"Did Gray initiate this?"

"And Durand, there are also people responding in Zurich."

Schmidt seemed somewhat excited.

"This is an opportunity, Director. If we can prove that this set of discrete tools has unstable boundary effects when dealing with large networks, we can bring network topology back to the track of continuous manifolds, which is to protect our research funding."

"Schmidt, don't you understand yet?"

The director turned around and rubbed Xiu's red eyes, which were red from overuse of his eyes.

"Gray and his team aren't questioning the logic; they're questioning the style."

"That arrogant style, where you look down on everyone and don't care about anyone."

"If this paper is accepted, and if Chen Zhuo's discrete decision-making method becomes the standard method for future network topology, it means that all our efforts over the past thirty years, the textbooks we have written, and the students we have taught have become meaningless accumulations."

The director took the joint letter from Schmidt.

"This kind of admission is worse than death. It's like you've spent your whole life building a beautiful carriage, and then suddenly someone drives a tank right in front of you and doesn't even bother to look back at you."

He took a pen from the pen holder and signed his name heavily at the signature line.

"Sign it, for the sake of the meaning of our lives."