"What’s that supposed to mean? This is what you call a scholar’s nonconformity, all right."
Li Jianming leaned back in his chair, looking at Chen Zhuo.
He knew this student all too well.
Although Chen Zhuo was usually easygoing, he would never drop by for an idle chat during work hours without a good reason.
"So, spill it. What’s wrong over at the School of Physics?" Li Jianming asked.
Chen Zhuo’s smile faded, and he leaned back slightly.
"The aerodynamic simulation for the high-speed train’s nose cone."
Chen Zhuo didn’t hide anything and laid out the whole situation.
"They upgraded the model from a 2D cross-section to a full-scale 3D version. When I plugged my matrix set into it, the mesh was divided into over forty million cells."
Li Jianming frowned slightly.
He wasn’t a physicist, but he knew exactly what high-order matrix multiplication with forty million nodes entailed.
"Forty million? Didn’t those junk machines in the server room start smoking?"
"They blue-screened," Chen Zhuo said, his tone flat.
"Three days and three nights for one percent on the progress bar."
Nearby, Wu Tao stopped shuffling the papers in his hands, dumbfounded.
"Forty million mesh cells? You guys at the School of Physics really are daring. Isn’t that like trying to move a mountain with a toothpick?"
"We had no choice."
Chen Zhuo stared at the tea leaves standing upright in his cup.
"The continuity equations in fluid dynamics are unsolvable directly. To simulate the continuous process of wind flowing over the curved surface of the nose cone, you can’t even find the initial boundary conditions without using a mesh."
Chen Zhuo paused, his voice dropping.
"I spent a week in the library trying to optimize the algorithm, trying to cut the number of mesh cells in half, but it’s just not logically feasible."
Li Jianming held his Zisha teapot, not rushing to speak.
He observed Chen Zhuo’s state—calm on the surface, but clearly caught in a dead end.
In Li Jianming’s eyes, Chen Zhuo was a genius, but even geniuses can get trapped by a concrete physical shape.
Li Jianming shook his head and let out a soft chuckle.
"You physicists, or engineers for that matter, all share a common flaw."
Li Jianming used the lid of his pot to skim the floating tea leaves, speaking in a slow, deliberate manner.
Chen Zhuo looked up at him.
"What flaw?"
"Tunnel vision."
Li Jianming placed the Zisha teapot on the table, making a crisp clinking sound.
"Your eyes are always fixated on the concrete, the visible, the tangible physical form."
Li Jianming pointed to a globe on the table, then to the pen holder next to it.
"Whether it’s the nose of a high-speed train or the wing of an airplane, you’re always thinking about how to describe its length, width, and height, how to calculate every single depression on its surface."
Li Jianming leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach with the sort of arrogance unique to a pure mathematician.
"To the eyes of a pure mathematician, shape is the most meaningless of all superficial characteristics."
Chen Zhuo didn’t interrupt, listening quietly.
Wu Tao also sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at his advisor.
"You created forty million mesh cells. And for what? To approximate the true geometric characteristics of the nose cone’s surface."
Li Jianming looked at Chen Zhuo.
"But have you ever considered this: that nose cone, no matter how streamlined its design, what essential difference does it have from a loaf of bread in the world of topology?"
"No difference," Chen Zhuo replied.
"Exactly. So if there’s no difference, why are you letting yourself be held hostage by its geometry?"
Li Jianming stood up and walked to the whiteboard, where some remnants of Wu Tao’s thesis derivations were still visible.
He picked up a marker and drew a very irregular closed curve on the whiteboard, like a squashed lump of dough.
"A physicist would take a ruler to measure the perimeter of this lump of dough and create a mesh to calculate its surface area under stress."
Then, next to the lump of dough, Li Jianming wrote an abstract algebraic symbol.
"But a mathematician would look for its isomorphic mapping."
Li Jianming tapped the algebraic symbol forcefully with the tip of his marker.
"As long as I can find a set of polynomials, or an ideal, in algebraic space whose algebraic properties are isomorphic to the geometric properties of this lump of dough..."
Li Jianming turned around and looked Chen Zhuo in the eye.
"Then it no longer matters what this lump of dough looks like. You can throw the dough in the trash and work only with the algebraic equations made of these few letters."
Li Jianming tossed the marker back into the pen holder and clapped his hands together.
"That is algebra. Algebra is the essence of a thing after all its physical characteristics have been stripped away."
The office was silent.
Wu Tao scratched his head, feeling that his advisor’s argument was a bit of a stretch.
"Professor, Chen Zhuo’s team needs to calculate specific wind resistance data. If you abstract the train’s nose cone into a few letters, how can you produce the engineering parameters?"
"That’s not my problem."
Li Jianming waved his hand dismissively and sat back down in his chair.
"I’m just an old man who teaches math. I’m only responsible for telling him that pure mathematics has the tools. As for how he uses that knife on physics’s cutting board, that’s his business."
Chen Zhuo sat on the sofa, not having moved an inch.
The teacup in his hand was still steaming.
Li Jianming’s words were like a gust of wind, scattering the heavy, dense meshes that had been piling up in his mind for a week.
’Shape is an unimportant, superficial characteristic.’
’Isomorphic mapping.’
’Algebraic relations.’
These concepts were common knowledge in pure mathematics.
But for the past month, Chen Zhuo had been so caught up in the engineering requirements from Zhang Yuan’s team that he’d dived headfirst into a swamp of meshes and nodes, completely forgetting what his greatest weapon was.
Chen Zhuo placed the teacup on the coffee table and stood up.
"Good tea."
Chen Zhuo looked at Li Jianming.
Li Jianming smiled, picked up his mouse again, and clicked the refresh button on his email client.

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