My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 219 Questions

7:30 in the morning.

The noise from downstairs in the dormitory started much earlier than usual.

At this time of day, the sounds downstairs are usually bicycles or students getting up and washing up. Occasionally, someone will stand downstairs and shout for someone on the second floor to throw down a lunchbox.

Today is different.

The faint sound of a security guard shouting through a megaphone could be heard outside the window, echoing in the early morning air.

"Non-students of this building, please don't crowd around here! Hey you with the camera, move to the outside of the flower bed! I'm talking to you, stop pushing forward!"

Chen Zhuo sat at his desk, holding a cup in his hand.

Several sheets of draft paper that I hadn't finished writing on yesterday were spread on the table.

The window wasn't closed properly, leaving a crack. The noise from downstairs seeped in through that crack, buzzing through dormitory 215.

Chen Zhuo took a sip of water, but didn't move or draw the curtains.

He just listened quietly.

After a while, a very light footstep was heard in the corridor. The footsteps were deliberately kept quiet and stopped in front of door 215.

Chen Zhuo put down his cup and stood up.

Two quick, light knocks came from outside the door, followed by a pause and another knock.

Chen Zhuo walked to the door, reached out and grasped the doorknob, and opened the door.

The door opened just a crack, and a figure slid in sideways.

It's Wang Dayong.

His normally burly physique was now displaying a flexibility and speed that were completely incongruous with his size.

As soon as he entered the room, without even taking a breath, he slammed the door shut with his backhand and then, with a click, turned the switch all the way down.

After doing all this, Wang Dayong finally let out a long sigh of relief.

"Goodness."

Wang Dayong wiped the sweat from his forehead and placed the plastic bags he was carrying on Chen Zhuo's desk.

"I ate breakfast like a thief today."

Chen Zhuo looked at the plastic bag on the table. Inside were several steaming hot meat buns and two cups of soy milk, with a little moisture clinging to the bag.

"You've been recognized?"

Chen Zhuo pulled over a chair and sat down, casually untying the knot on the plastic bag.

No, not at all.

Wang Dayong walked to his bed, plopped down, and casually picked up a book to fan himself.

"But as soon as I left the cafeteria, I was targeted."

Chen Zhuo took a straw, pinched one end, aimed it at the soy milk, and forcefully poked it in.

"Who's watching you?"

"How would I know?"

Wang Dayong curled his lip.

"A man who looked to be in his thirties, carrying a black bag, who didn't look like he was from our school, followed me all the way to the bottom of our building and kept asking me if I knew someone named Chen Zhuo."

Chen Zhuo took a bite of the meat bun. The meat juice inside was a little hot. He chewed it a few times and swallowed it.

"What did you say?"

"What can I say?" Wang Dayong laughed.

"I said I knew him, everyone in this building knows him, and then he stuffed his business card into my hand and asked me what Chen Zhuo usually likes to do, what time he gets up, which canteen he likes to eat at, and even asked me which stall I usually use when I go to the toilet."

Chen Zhuo stopped eating the steamed bun and glanced at Wang Dayong.

"You didn't tell him, did you?"

"I must be crazy to tell him that."

Wang Dayong leaned against the headboard railing.

"I pointed to Chu Ge, who had just come out, and said, 'That's Chen Zhuo's roommate. Go ask him.' Then, while he was bothering Chu Ge, I came back through the back door."

Chen Zhuo lowered his head and continued eating his steamed bun.

"Tsk tsk."

"This is called a tactical shift."

Wang Dayong also took a steamed bun and ate half of it in a few bites.

"You have no idea what's going on downstairs right now. The dorm supervisor has moved his desk right in the middle of the main entrance. The security department has brought in three people to guard it. They're checking student IDs more strictly than they are checking for cheating during final exams. I bet in a couple of days everyone will be showing their student IDs to get into the school."

Chen Zhuo took a sip of soy milk and swallowed it.

"Let's just hang in there."

His voice was very steady, without any noticeable fluctuation.

"It'll be fine once the novelty wears off."

"In a while?"

Wang Dayong shook his head.

"You haven't read today's newspaper yet, have you?"

"I didn't look, I didn't even go downstairs."

"The dorm next door just went and bought one; I glanced at it."

Wang Dayong swallowed the food in his mouth and looked at Chen Zhuo.

"They said you're some kind of... ghost from the East, and that the foreign old man who won the highest mathematics award took you as his last disciple. Mathematicians all over the world are arguing about you now."

Chen Zhuo remained silent.

He ate the steamed bun in his hand one bite after another. The bun skin was a bit thick, the dough hadn't risen well enough, and it was a little sticky when he chewed it.

"Xiao Zhuo."

Wang Dayong leaned forward and lowered his voice.

"Tell me the truth, did you really come up with some formula that can build an atomic bomb?"

Chen Zhuo stuffed the last bite of the bun into his mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed it.

"no."

"Then why are all those people outside searching for you like madmen?"

Chen Zhuo pulled out a tissue and wiped the oil stains off his fingers.

"Pierre has a bad temper, but he's also quite shrewd, so he offends a lot of people."

Chen Zhu crumpled the dirty tissue into a ball and threw it into the trash can at his feet.

"Love me, love my dog; the same goes for hate. It's normal that I also dislike his colleagues."

Wang Dayong looked at him with a mixture of belief and doubt.

"It's that simple?"

"It's that simple."

Wang Dayong stared at Chen Zhuo for a while. Chen Zhuo's expression was very calm, so calm that no one could find a flaw in his expression.

"Alright."

Wang Dayong leaned back and picked up the steamed bun again.

"Anyway, in this building, no matter how much people outside talk about you, you're still just a nobody who needs me to bring him breakfast."

Chen Zhuo smiled.

I'll pay for tomorrow's breakfast.

"Absolutely, I'll add an egg too."

The dormitory quieted down, with only the sounds of two people chewing their food and the occasional blare of the security guard's loudspeaker outside the window.

The sunlight slowly climbed upwards, illuminating a corner of the desk.

After finishing the last sip of soy milk, Chen Zhuo threw the empty plastic cup into the trash can. He then took out a clean tissue and wiped up the little bit of soy milk that had accidentally spilled on the table.

Then, he pulled the chair closer.

A stack of draft paper lay on the table, the top page bearing several smooth curves.

At the very top of the header was a half-line formula that he had derived a few days earlier.

This is a fundamental expression that cannot be bypassed in algebraic geometry.

That symbol with a subscript represents the rational number system, and also represents the goal that the entire Western mathematical community is currently working to achieve.

Hodge conjecture based on rational number fields.

Wrapped in rational numbers, the curves of a manifold are continuous, forming a relatively smooth and comfortable safe zone.

After finishing his breakfast, Wang Dayong stood up, dusted off the crumbs on his hands, and went to his closet to find his clothes.

"I'm going to the lab in a bit."

Wang Dayong said this while rummaging through the clothes.

"Professor Liu has an experiment going on, I need to go check on it for a while. Shall I bring you lunch?"

"No need," Chen Zhuo said.

"I'll make myself some instant noodles later."

"Fine, anyway, judging from the note you posted on your door, no one dares to knock."

That's what Chu Ge stuck on the security door last night.

The sign above reads: "Chen Zhuo is calculating; anyone who knocks on the door will bear the consequences."

Wang Dayong changed his shoes, pushed open the door, peeked out and looked around the corridor like a scout, and then slipped out.

With a click, the door locked, and the dormitory fell completely silent.

Chen Zhuo sat in the chair, his gaze fixed on the draft paper.

He looked at those continuous, smooth curves.

They meander and intertwine on the paper, forming perfect geometric shapes.

These lines have no breaks or gaps; you can divide them infinitely as you wish, and they will always remain continuous.

This is the foundation of traditional calculus and continuous geometry.

Chen Zhuo picked up the pen on the table.

Prior to this, he and Pierre had discussed the boundary problem of topological spaces, and their derivations at that time were based on this smooth geometry.

But he knew that the deduction had reached its end.

In the logical chain of mathematics, this is a one-way street.

When the scale of observation is reduced to the most microscopic level to touch upon the most core essence, the original smoothness becomes an illusion.

It's like looking at a seemingly perfect photo with a magnifying glass; when you zoom in to the maximum, all you see are square pixels.

Continuous sequences cannot solve problems involving integers.

To touch integers, you must break the lines.

Chen Zhuo's eyes were calm.

He showed no disdain for past theories, nor was he excited about stepping into the unknown.

He looked at the one that represented rational numbers.

The pen tip fell to the ground.

Without hesitation, he drew an X on the symbol that represents the core of the traditional Hodge conjecture.

Next, next to the cross, he wrote a sharply defined letter: the set of integers.

The properties of the formula change the moment the set of rational numbers is replaced by the set of integers.

The continuous protective shell was actively peeled away, and the derivation stepped into a region untouched by algebraic geometry.

The whole Hodge conjecture.

Then, he turned the draft paper over, revealing the blank back side.

He started dotting on the paper.

Once, twice.

He placed a dot in the upper left corner of the paper, and then placed a second dot at an equal distance next to it.

Then came the third, and the fourth.

After clicking through one row, he clicked through the second row below.

A few minutes later, a square array of countless black dots appeared on the white draft paper.

These points are arranged closely together, but they are absolutely isolated from each other.

There are no lines connecting them; there are absolute gaps and voids between them.

This is discrete.

This is the territory of integers.

Chen Zhuo looked at the grid.

What would happen if we forced those smooth topologies into this square matrix composed of discrete grid points?

The lines will be fragmented by these isolated points.

The originally perfectly closed structure will become misaligned due to the gaps between these points.

Some parts will be extra, and some parts will be missing a piece.

In mathematics, these extra, imperfectly fitting fragments are called tortuous parts.

They are like the metal filings produced when machine gears mesh, or the harsh friction sound made when two mismatched parts are forced together.

Traditional geometers disliked these fragments.

They would try to introduce more complex continuous functions to smooth out these errors and mask them.

Chen Zhuo had no intention of covering it up.

He picked up his pen and wrote an algebraic matrix next to the grid.

He had to pick out all the debris and place them one by one on the table.

The first matrix is ​​complete.

Rows and columns intertwine, and cold numbers replace the blurry curves.

He doesn't need to prove whether these fragments are perfect.

He only needs to calculate at what point these debris will accumulate before the entire topology collapses.

The pen tip moves very quickly across the paper.

There's no need to pause and think, because the logical deduction has already been laid out in the brain; the hand is merely a tool for execution.

The sunlight outside the dormitory gradually brightened, shining on the desk.

Occasionally, a breeze would blow by, causing the slightly ajar window to sway gently and make a soft creaking sound.

The loudspeaker noises downstairs are becoming increasingly difficult to hear.

Chen Zhuo finished writing the first page.

He put the paper aside and took a second blank sheet of draft paper.

Without any hesitation, he continued writing.

The matrix grew larger and larger, and also more and more violent.

The geometric transformations that originally required dozens of pages of derivation were abruptly cut and reassembled by him using lines of algebraic expressions.

There is no embellishment, no transition.

Only the most direct disassembly.

Time was ticking away, second by second.

Chen Zhuo held the edge of the paper with his left hand and gripped the pen with his right.

His breathing was steady, no different from usual.

When I got to the sixth page, my pen suddenly stopped.

He looked at the last line of the equation on the paper.

In this matrix composed of discrete lattice points, an unavoidable singularity has appeared.

No matter how the rows and columns are changed, this singularity always exists.

It's like a nail, firmly driven into the center of this topology.

This means that the perfect conjecture does not hold true within the range of integers.

It will inevitably break here.

In mathematics, this misalignment, which is stuck in the center of the matrix, is called the tortuous part of the Kroh group.

This is the problem that the entire Hodge conjecture is bound to collapse.

Chen Zhuo stared at the singularity for a while.

He put down his pen and rubbed his wrist.

Then, he picked up his pen again and drew a circle next to the singularity, framing it.

Chen Zhuo capped the pen and threw it on the table.

He leaned back in his chair and stretched.

I'm a little hungry.

He glanced at the alarm clock on the table; it was almost one o'clock in the afternoon.

He stood up, went to the bathroom to wash his face, and splashed cold water on his face, which cleared his mind.

Back in his dorm room, he opened a drawer and took out a packet of braised beef noodles.

Tear open the packaging bag, crush the bread, and pour it into a bowl along with the seasoning packet. Then pour in boiling water.

Steam rose, carrying the aroma of instant noodles.

Chen Zhuo took a book and covered the bowl with it.

He walked to the window and looked out through the glass.

Some of the people downstairs had dispersed, but the folding table from the security office was still there, and two people were squatting by the flower bed smoking, with camera bags at their feet.

Chen Zhuo withdrew his gaze and walked back to his desk.

He straightened the six sheets of draft paper filled with discrete matrices, clipped them together, and casually put them into the back of the drawer.