Returning to my senior year of high school before college, I became addicted to dating.

September 22nd.

During the day, it was still the same routine: standing at attention, marching in step, walking in unison, dismissed, assembled, and dismissed again.

The sun moved from east to west, and the shadows grew shorter. Sun Jianguo's voice was hoarse.

Zhang Wei's incoherent hand and foot movements have been mostly cured, but they still occasionally recur, so Sun Jianguo singles him out for extra training.

Lin Feng stood in the queue, his mind preoccupied with plans for the entrepreneurship club.

Affiliated with the School of Management requires a mentor; where will the activity funding come from? How will the recruitment threshold be set?

In his previous life, he led a team in a financial company, but university clubs are different from companies; they have many rules, so he had to find the right path.

After the afternoon training session ended, Sun Jianguo announced that there would be an elective mathematics class that evening, which all freshmen were required to attend.

In the lecture hall, the three companies sat together, the air filled with the smells of sweat and floral water.

The lecturer was a professor in his fifties, surnamed Chen, with gray hair, wearing old-fashioned square-framed glasses, and speaking slowly and deliberately, like a lullaby.

He wrote a problem on the blackboard, neatly and carefully. After finishing, he turned around and patted the chalk dust off his hands.

"Who wants to try this question?"

The lecture hall fell silent. Those in the front row were looking down at their books, those in the back were looking at their phones, and those in the middle were pretending to be thinking.

Professor Chen's gaze swept over the rows of heads; no one raised their hand. He adjusted his glasses and repeated, "No one willing to give it a try? This question isn't difficult; it just requires you to think outside the box."

Someone in the back row whispered, "What is this thing? I can't understand it at all."

Zhang Wei, slumped over the table, said to Lin Feng, "We're doomed, they're going to take attendance."

Professor Chen's gaze happened to drift over, and Zhang Wei quickly buried his face in his arms.

Li Mo, who was next to Lin Feng, put down his pen.

He stood up, a small movement, but the chairs in the lecture hall were flip-up, and when he stood up, there was a "snap" sound, drawing the attention of several people around him.

Li Mo pushed up his glasses, walked out of his seat, and all eyes in the class followed him to the blackboard.

People around whispered, "Holy crap! Does anyone actually know how to solve such a complicated problem?"

"Is this kid trying to show off?"

Li Mo picked up the chalk and wrote the first solution on the blackboard.

In his hands, chalk didn't feel like chalk; it felt like a carving knife. Each stroke was clean and precise, without any unnecessary movements.

After finishing writing, he stepped back to look at it, then picked up another color of chalk and wrote down the second solution.

This time it's faster and the steps are simpler. I've drawn a horizontal line in the last line to circle the result.

He paused for a few seconds, changed to a different piece of chalk, and wrote down the third solution.

This time, a different approach was used, approaching the topic from a different angle. Every step was clear and logical, so rigorous that it seemed to have been copied from a textbook.

The lecture hall was completely silent.

Professor Chen stood to the side, initially watching with his arms crossed, then lowering his arms, and then his eyes lit up.

He walked to the blackboard, looked at the first solution and then the third, stepped back and looked at it again, then turned to look at Li Mo.

"What's this student's name?"

"Li Mo".

The professor nodded with an appreciative look, then looked down at the students.

"Li Mo's three solutions were all excellent, especially the third one, which used a different mathematical model and was very creative. Li Mo could study under me as a graduate student in the future."

A buzzing sound filled the classroom.

Zhang Wei lifted his head from his arms, his mouth agape, with an expression that said, "My roommate is a genius."

Lin Feng leaned back in his chair, watching Li Mo's retreating figure, a slight smile playing on his lips.

Shen Yutong stopped writing, her gaze shifting from the blackboard to Li Mo, then to Lin Feng's face. She noticed Lin Feng was smiling, so she lowered her head and drew a few lines on her notebook.

Li Mo walked back to his seat from the blackboard, dusted off the chalk, picked up the book "Mathematical Analysis" again, and continued reading.

After class, Lin Feng looked at Li Mo and said, "Come on, I'll treat you to a soda."

Li Mo closed the book, didn't ask why, and followed them out of the classroom.

There were no more people training on the playground, and a few couples were sitting sparsely in the stands.

Lin Feng bought two bottles of Jianlibao and handed one to Li Mo.

Li Mo took it and took a sip. He didn't really like this kind of sweet drink, but he didn't refuse.

The two found a step by the playground and sat down, with half a meter between them.

The grass on the playground had just been cut, and the air smelled of fresh grass mixed with the rubbery smell unique to sports fields.

Lin Feng placed the drink on the steps and looked at the end of the playground in the distance.

"Li Mo, have you ever thought about using mathematics to make money?"

Li Mo turned his head. This wasn't the first time he'd heard Lin Feng say something like this, but each time it didn't seem like a joke.

"How do you make money?"

Lin Feng didn't answer immediately. He took out his phone from his pocket and waved it.

"With increasingly powerful mobile phone hardware, once mobile phone performance improves, everything will be moved to mobile phones."

"Banks, maps, chat, buying and selling, reading news, searching for information—everyone will have a computer in their pocket in the future. And the core of these functions is algorithms."

He pointed to his phone screen: "For example, when you open a webpage, why is some content displayed at the top and some at the bottom? It's not random; it's calculated by an algorithm. In the future, there will be something called a 'recommendation engine,' which predicts your preferences based on your behavior and pushes the most suitable content to you. All of this requires mathematics."

Li Mo gripped Jianlibao's hand slightly tighter. "You mean data mining?"

Lin Feng looked at him: "You know?"

"I've read a few papers," Li Mo said calmly. "They mainly focus on clustering algorithms and collaborative filtering. But right now, the amount of data is insufficient, and the model accuracy still has issues. Once computing power increases, these algorithms will really shine."

Lin Feng was taken aback. He had originally planned to spend some time explaining the trends of the Internet to Li Mo, and even considered starting with the basic concepts, but he didn't expect that Li Mo had already seen these things.

"You're already researching it?"

"It's not research, just curiosity." Li Mo took another sip of soda. "You're right, everything on the internet in the future will be algorithms. Search is, recommendation is, matching is, even social network distribution is."

Lin Feng leaned back on the steps, gazing at the lights of the distant playground. "I want to start a tech company someday, something like social media, content recommendation, or mobile payments. I need people who understand algorithms." He turned to Li Mo. "Do you want to come?"

Li Mo was silent for a moment. He put down his drink and adjusted his glasses.

"Brother Feng, you are the most unique person I have ever met."

"I've looked into what you're talking about. Some of it is still in the lab stage, and some hasn't even been published yet. I'm not sure how you know that. But I don't need to know."

He looked at Lin Feng and said, "If you trust me, I'll trust you. Call me anytime if you need anything."

Lin Feng also looked at him and extended his hand.

Li Mo glanced at the hand and grasped it. The two didn't say anything more, released each other's hands, and drank their sodas.