"This tool lets me finish exams twenty minutes faster than everyone else, and it helps me make fewer mistakes when calculating huge fund flows. That’s good enough for me. As for whether the theory is beautiful or not, that’s something for you math and physics people to worry about. I’m a pragmatic person. I only care if it works."
Chen Zhuo stood his ground, looking at the short-haired girl in a faded white T-shirt, and couldn’t help but be taken aback.
Such pure, almost rapacious pragmatism, instead of being off-putting, radiated a kind of untamed vitality.
"That’s good."
Chen Zhuo picked up his water bottle and smiled.
"Keep chopping at your cutting board, just remember not to dull the blade. By the way, the initial value you set for the eigenvalue transition probability is a bit conservative. Try making it a little larger; you could boost your calculation speed by another five percent or so."
After tossing out this casual remark, Chen Zhuo carried his water bottle and headed for the water cooler.
By the time Chen Zhuo returned, Su Wei was already re-deriving the matrix on her scratch paper, following his suggestion.
Neither of them spoke again. The reading room returned to its familiar quiet, with each of them absorbed in their own work.
The sun’s shadow outside the window gradually shifted westward.
Chen Zhuo returned to his seat, opened his notebook, and took out the two pages of scratch paper containing his graph theory proof.
’Today’s the day to finish this.’
’Just one last step.’
At the end of the original paper, to prove the stability of a certain lower bound, the author had used a full four pages for a case-by-case analysis of the topological graphs under extreme conditions.
Gazing at the massive algebraic eigenvalue map already formed on his scratch paper, Chen Zhuo picked up his pen.
’No need for a case-by-case analysis.’
In the world of algebra, all extreme cases ultimately converge within the boundary constraints of the matrix’s largest eigenvalue.
The pen tip moved steadily across the paper.
Lines of clear, fluid algebraic expressions flowed from his hand, like a clear spring washing the silt from a stone to reveal the hard, primordial texture beneath.
Just as he wrote the final inequality and drew the small black square in the bottom-right corner to signify the end of the proof, the sky outside darkened.
The campus streetlights lit up one after another.
Chen Zhuo stopped writing, picked up the two and a half sheets of scratch paper, and reviewed them from start to finish, not missing a single detail.
The logic was a perfect closed loop. There were no logical leaps, no contrived lemmas.
A cumbersome proof of over thirty pages had been completely deconstructed into a five-page structure that was perfectly self-consistent within an algebraic framework.
He let out a long breath, flattened the papers, and tucked them into his notebook.
"Finished setting up the board?"
Su Wei’s voice drifted over from her desk across the aisle. She was tidying up her stationery, crumpling the day’s few scrap papers into a ball.
Chen Zhuo looked up and capped his pen, which made a soft CLICK.
"Mm."
He gave a simple nod.
"Just hammered in the last nail."
"Sounds like a pretty big project."
Su Wei picked up her water bottle.
"Are you going to look at those new journals tomorrow?"
"No."
Chen Zhuo slung his messenger bag over his shoulder.
"Over the next few days, while you’re reading, could you keep an eye out for the *Graph Theory Journal* or any of the other core ones? Don’t go out of your way to find them, just whatever you happen to come across."
"Sure."
The two of them walked out of the reading room, one after the other.
At the stairwell landing, they naturally parted ways.
Su Wei walked south toward the women’s dorm, while Chen Zhuo followed the tree-lined path toward the men’s dormitory building.
The evening breeze was cool and felt pleasant against his skin.
Back in dorm room 215, he pushed open the door to a pitch-black room.
Chen Zhuo turned on the light.
He walked to his desk, put down his messenger bag, and pulled out the sheets of scratch paper covered in derivations.
’Now for the real manual labor.’
Chen Zhuo bent down and pressed the power button on the computer tower under his desk.
Chen Zhuo pulled out his chair and sat down, skillfully opening an early English word processing software.
Typesetting software in 2002 was nowhere near as intelligent or user-friendly as its later counterparts.
It was a complete nightmare, especially for handling pages full of English text, complex mathematical symbols, and large discrete algebraic matrices.
No one-click formula generation, no intelligent alignment features.
Chen Zhuo pulled the keyboard closer.
With the crisp tapping of keys, lines of the all-English abstract and introduction appeared on the white-on-blue screen.
Typing this text wasn’t difficult for him. The vocabulary and English foundation he had accumulated from his previous life and his current one were more than enough for him to describe his argument in precise, flawless academic language.
The dorm room was quiet, with only the whir of the ceiling fan and the rhythmic tapping of Chen Zhuo’s fingertips on the keyboard.
Chen Zhuo was focused.
He needed to ensure that the spacing of every symbol and the alignment of every equation across the five pages achieved a visual balance.
At least, it had to look right to him.
Time ticked by, second by second.
The night outside grew deeper. Occasionally, he could hear a few barks from the distant faculty housing.
When he typed the final line of the conclusion and added the period that stood for Q.E.D., Chen Zhuo’s hands stopped over the keyboard.
He rubbed his neck, took a sip of water from the bottle on his desk, then gripped the mouse and began to check the formatting from the very first line, word by word.
The matrices were aligned perfectly.
No subscripts were missing.
The logical derivation was a perfect match for his scratch notes, without a single discrepancy.
Chen Zhuo nodded in satisfaction, moved the mouse, and clicked the save button in the top-left corner.
Then, he bent down and pressed the power switch on the printer next to the computer tower.
Chen Zhuo pressed the print shortcut key on the computer.
Soon, the printer ate a blank sheet of A4 paper. The first page, filled with pure English text and complex algebraic matrices, slowly slid from the output tray.
The five pages finished printing quickly.
Chen Zhuo reached out and took them from the tray.
The black ink was crisp on the page, the formatting so pristine it looked as if it had been torn directly from a top-tier journal.
Chen Zhuo tapped the stack of five pages on his desk, squaring the edges.
Over thirty tedious, lengthy pages of proof by exhaustion based on continuity.
Five clean, sharp pages of reconstruction using discrete algebra.
Chen Zhuo opened a drawer and pulled out an international airmail envelope with red and white stripes along the border.
Picking up a black pen, Chen Zhuo wrote an address in English on the recipient line.
It was the overseas address for the editorial office of *Discrete Mathematics*. He had committed it to memory a few days ago while browsing journals in the reading room.
In the "From" field, he simply wrote his name in Pinyin: Chen Zhuo, along with the mailing address for Hua Country Science and Technology University.
After writing the address, he slid the five pages into the envelope, peeled the strip off the adhesive flap, and sealed it shut.
Having done all this, Chen Zhuo glanced at the wall clock.
It was almost one in the morning.
He turned off the computer and the printer.
He washed up, turned off the light, and went to bed.

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