My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 283 David

The air in the lecture hall grew more and more stifling each day.

By the afternoon of the third day, the rows of huge overhead lights seemed to be covered with a layer of gray and tiredness.

On the platform, the huge sliding blackboard was pulled up and down, and white chalk writing covered every inch of space.

The partial differential equations that have just been written down will be erased by the blackboard eraser in less than half an hour, and then filled with new equations.

Zhu Xiping stood with his back to the audience, tapping the blackboard repeatedly with the chalk in his hand.

The sound was much slower than on the first day.

He turned around, picked up the water bottle from the podium, unscrewed the cap, and took a big gulp.

His voice was a little hoarse. Two days of continuous writing on the blackboard and dealing with interrogations, coupled with the dry heating in Boston, had pushed his vocal cords to their limit.

Cao Huaidong sat on the chair to the side, the photocopied manuscript in front of him had been completely changed.

The once neat edges of the A4 paper were now covered with colorful sticky notes and memos.

Some of the pages were curled up at the edges. He held the manuscript with his left hand and a red pen in his right, occasionally making a mark on it.

"Add a truncation function here."

Zhu Xiping's hoarse voice echoed throughout the classroom through the microphone.

He drew a smooth transition zone on the blackboard.

"Control the rate of curvature increase, and then plug it into the evolution equation."

The academicians in the first row did not interrupt as frequently as they had on the first day.

They simply leaned back in their chairs, their eyes following the chalk on the blackboard, occasionally glancing down to make a mark on their manuscripts.

The frequency of nitpicking has decreased, but the level of detail in the review has not diminished at all.

The atmosphere in the hundreds of seats below the stage was completely different from when the show started.

The tense, excited feeling of being ready to watch the excitement or clash on the first day had long since vanished without a trace.

Instead, it's pure mental exhaustion.

Some people leaned back in their chairs with their eyes closed, their brows furrowed, their fingers gesturing unconsciously in the air. Others scribbled wildly in their notebooks, trying to copy down every convergence condition on the blackboard.

Some of the older professors simply put down their pens, crossed their arms, and stared blankly at the blackboard.

The derivation of partial differential equations in continuous space is like an endless meat grinder.

Chen Zhuo sat in the fifth row from the bottom, near the aisle.

Pierre and Arthur went to another closed-door meeting of the Harvard Mathematics Department this afternoon and didn't come to listen in. Chen Zhuo is sitting here alone.

On the table in front of him was an ordinary piece of white paper.

During those three days, he didn't copy a single equation from the blackboard.

On the left half of the white paper, several very irregular manifold cross sections are drawn.

Chen Zhuo drew a circle at a narrow point in the manifold, which represents the singularity where the topological structure breaks.

He stared at the circle, his mind replaying the scene on stage where Zhu Xiping forcibly repaired the fracture using partial differential equations.

It's complicated, massive, and full of traps.

Chen Zhuo stopped writing and put a big X on the circle that represented the singularity.

Then, move the pen to the right half of the white paper.

There are no continuous lines here.

Chen Zhuo made one black dot after another on the paper.

The dots are arranged in a discrete grid array, with a certain distance between them.

He stared at these unconnected black dots, lost in thought.

The voices on the podium gradually faded away, and the evolutionary logic of partial differential equations was peeled away layer by layer in his mind.

He doesn't need to patch the holes in the continuous space; he only needs to find the traces left by the algebraic cycles on this discrete network.

Chen Zhuo drew a line between the two black dots.

If we map the deformation of the manifold onto this network, can the degeneration of the intermediate Jacobian cluster be replaced by the transition of the mesh nodes?

He tilted his head slightly and tapped the table with the tip of his pen.

A sudden, urgent bell rang in the corridor outside the lecture hall.

The afternoon's fifteen-minute tea break is over.

Zhu Xiping on the stage stopped writing with chalk, turned around and threw the half-chopped piece of chalk into the chalk trough. Cao Huaidong also closed the manuscript covered with labels, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

The academicians in the first row stood up, stretched their aching shoulders, and slowly walked towards the door.

The tense atmosphere in the classroom instantly relaxed, filled with the sounds of chairs being pushed back and pens being put away.

Most of the people stood up, holding empty paper cups, and eagerly rushed to the coffee machine and water dispenser in the corridor.

Chen Zhuo capped the pen in his hand and casually clipped it to the edge of the white paper.

He stood up and followed the crowd up the stairs to the outside corridor.

The air in the hallway was a bit colder than in the classroom, but also much fresher.

Everywhere you look, there are scholars gathered in twos and threes discussing things.

Most people looked unwell, with dark circles under their eyes from staying up late. The sounds of paper cups clinking together and hushed complaints mingled together.

Chen Zhuo walked to a water dispenser at the end of the corridor.

There was a long line at the coffee machine, but not many people were at the water dispenser.

"Excuse me, thank you."

A somewhat hoarse voice came from the side.

Chen Zhuo stepped aside by half a step.

A young white scholar, around twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, walked over.

He was wearing a gray-blue sweater with a slightly wrinkled collar, his hair was messy, and he had two obvious dark circles under his eyes.

The young scholar held a thick, bound loose-leaf notebook in his left hand and an empty paper cup in his right.

He placed the paper cup under the water dispenser's spout and pressed the hot water button.

He didn't stop working while the water was flowing out.

He leaned the loose-leaf notebook against the side of the water dispenser, freed his right hand, took a pen from his pocket, bit off the cap, and quickly wrote something on the page he had just turned.

He was writing very quickly, unconsciously muttering a few words to himself, as if afraid he would forget a certain factor in his mind the next second.

"Clatter".

The pen cap he was biting didn't stay in his mouth, and it fell to the ground, rolled twice, and came to rest at Chen Zhuo's feet.

The young scholar was writing a crucial part, without even looking up, just frowning, intending to bend down and pick it up after finishing this line.

Chen Zhuo glanced down and picked up the pen cap.

The water dispenser is full of hot water.

The young scholar released the button, removed the paper cup, and then stopped writing, preparing to look down for the pen cap.

A hand reached out, palm up, with the pen cap lying securely inside.

"Give."

The young scholar paused for a moment, then looked up.

He glanced at Chen Zhuo, then at the pen cap in his hand.

"Thank you, thank you very much."

The young scholar quickly took the pen cap and put it back on the pen.

His loose-leaf notebook was filled with lines of formulas and evolution conditions.

Many parts were heavily crossed out, and new equations were added next to them. The handwriting was very messy, obviously written in a hurry and when tired.

The young scholar stared at one of the pages for a while, his brows furrowing deeper and deeper.

He slammed the loose-leaf notebook shut in frustration, picked up the paper cup, and took a big gulp of water, as if trying to suppress the discomfort in his stomach.

He turned his head and glanced at Chen Zhuo standing beside him.

Chen Zhuo leaned against the white wall of the corridor, holding only a simple paper cup in his hand. He exuded a refreshing and calm demeanor that was different from the others in the corridor.

There was no anxiety from not understanding, nor the tense impatience of rushing to meet deadlines.

The young scholar looked at Chen Zhuo's empty hands, then glanced at the door of the lecture hall.

"You didn't take notes?"

The young scholar spoke first, his voice tinged with obvious fatigue and a hint of self-deprecation.

Chen Zhuo turned his head and looked at the other person.

"I didn't bring my notebook," Chen Zhuo replied gently.

The young scholar gave a wry smile and shook his head.

"Or are you like me, having already given up when Professor Zhu filled the third blackboard?"

The young scholar wiped his chin with the back of his hand.

"The extreme range scaling left by Hamilton is a disaster. I just tried to derive it myself, and the convergence coefficients in the middle are three orders of magnitude different. I really can't understand how they managed to squeeze the boundary so tightly."

The young scholar clearly mistook Chen Zhuo for an undergraduate or junior graduate student sent by a university to audit the class.

Too many young people gave up halfway through this presentation.

Chen Zhuo listened quietly to the other person's complaints.

He didn't explain the logic behind the extreme value range scaling, nor did he adopt any expert's stance.

I don't do partial differential equations.

Chen Zhuo took a sip of water, his tone calm, as if he were talking about today's weather.

"The amount of computation inside is indeed too large. I just came to see how continuous topology collapses at singularities."

The young scholar was taken aback.

His hand holding the coffee stopped in mid-air. He turned his head and took a closer look at the Asian boy in front of him.

"Let's see how a continuous topology collapses?"

The young scholar repeated the sentence, raising his eyebrows.

Although his mind was a bit fuzzy, he was, after all, a professional scholar who could sit in this lecture hall and listen to lectures.

An undergraduate student who just came to join in the fun wouldn't use a sentence structure like "continuous topology collapses at a singularity".

The young scholar's gaze shifted downwards and landed on the conference pass hanging around Chen Zhuo's neck.

The pass was printed with the Harvard logo, and below it was written the affiliated institution: Princeton University.

Next, you'll find the pinyin of the name.

Zhuo Chen.

The young scholar stared at the name for a second, his pupils contracting slightly.

The rumor that had been the hottest topic of discussion during breaks in the meetings these past few days flashed through his mind.

That fourteen-year-old boy from China who cut open the scratch part of the high-dimensional Chow group in the Hodge conjecture.

It had already spread among their circle a couple of nights ago.

The young scholar looked up at Chen Zhuo's youthful face.

He didn't let out an exaggerated exclamation, nor did he spill the coffee in his hand.

People in this circle have seen far too many geniuses.

He just found it somewhat unbelievable, and then that unbelievable feeling turned into a long sigh.

"God."

The young scholar took half a step back and leaned against the wall.

"Algebraic geometry... are you Chen from Princeton, the one who cuts open the scratch?"

Chen Zhuo nodded frankly.

"Chen Zhuo".

He gave his Chinese name, which he pronounced very clearly.

The young scholar stretched out his free right hand and patted his forehead.

No wonder.

He looked at Chen Zhuo, gave a bitter smile, and seemed even more tired.

"So that's why I was wondering who could stand so easily in this corridor. Turns out they're an algebra student."

The young scholar lowered his hand and looked in the direction of the lecture hall.

"If I had your kind of abnormal algebraic intuition, I wouldn't be sitting here, being tortured half to death by Ricci flow partial differential equations."

There was no jealousy in his tone, only pure banter between colleagues and genuine helplessness.

"Your way of dealing with singularities is much cleaner. The quagmire in continuous space is really no place for a human to live."

"Each has its own difficulties. The rigidity of algebraic cycles is also very torturous. Although the battle in continuous space is heavy, Professor Zhu and his colleagues still figured it out step by step. I can't do what they did and forcibly stitch singularities together on the blackboard."

The young scholar looked at Chen Zhuo with some surprise as he listened to his words.

He originally thought that such a young genius who had achieved fame at a young age and worked on algebraic geometry would be somewhat arrogant and disdainful of the tedious work of partial differential equations.

But he could hear genuine respect in Chen Zhuo's tone.

That's probably an attitude you only develop after you've truly understood someone else's work.

"The truth."

The young scholar laughed, his shoulders relaxing considerably.

"Zhu Xiping's blackboard writing on the stage was truly disheartening. I felt that he was writing these equations even in his dreams."

The hallway was still very chaotic.

Chen Zhuo crushed the empty paper cup in his hand.

"But you're right too."

Chen Zhuo looked at the creases on the paper cup.

"Things in continuous manifolds really don't suit me. I've looked at them for three days, and I've had enough."

The young scholar turned his head away.

"Not listening anymore?"

"Um."

Chen Zhuo nodded.

"The failure of continuous space metrics confirms my idea that to bypass these computational burdens, I can only retreat completely to discrete grid points."

Although young scholars do not study algebraic geometry, they still have basic topological concepts.

After thinking for a moment, he understood the meaning behind Chen Zhuo's words.

"Break the continuous manifold into a grid?" the young scholar asked.

"Use discrete nodes to approximate?"

"I guess so," Chen Zhuo smiled.

"It just takes time to build this bridge, and there's no point in lingering here. I plan to go back to Princeton in a couple of days."

The doorbell on the wall rang again, its shrill sound cutting through the conversations in the hallway.

The 15-minute break is over.

The scholars in the corridor sighed, threw their empty paper cups into the trash can, rubbed their faces, and turned to walk back to the lecture hall.

The meat grinder is going to start up again.

The young scholar straightened up when he heard the bell.

He switched the cup in his hand to his left hand, and took out the pen from his pocket with his right hand.

He opened the loose-leaf notebook tucked under his arm, turned to the last blank page, and deftly tore off a small triangular corner of paper.

He pressed the corner of the paper against the wall and quickly wrote a string of letters on it.

After the young scholar finished writing, he handed the corner of the paper to Chen Zhuo.

"I am David Collin, a postdoctoral researcher in geometry at MIT, specializing in geometry."

The young scholar looked at Chen Zhuo, his tone now carrying a more formal tone, as if he were making an acquaintance.

"This is my email address. If you've really finished building your discrete bridge, I hope we can exchange emails. I'm very curious about how far pure algebraic methods can go."

Chen Zhuo reached out and took the corner of the paper.

The handwriting is very clear, followed by the suffix mit.edu.

"it is good."

Chen Zhuo nodded.

He neatly placed the corner of the paper into his pocket, then took out a pen from his own pocket.

He looked around but couldn't find any extra paper.

David reacted quickly, flipping his loose-leaf notebook to the blank space on the back cover and handing it to Chen Zhuo.

Chen Zhuo did not refuse and steadily wrote down his Princeton internal email address.

"I'll send you the model once it's built."

Chen Zhuo put the pen away and looked at David.

David glanced at the email address, closed the notebook, and tucked it under his arm.

It's a deal.

David smiled, and the weariness in his eyes seemed to have faded somewhat.