Hearing this, Li Jianming raised an eyebrow.
He reached out and took the papers.
"You got it to run? You brought down forty million grid cells with algebraic mapping?"
There was a hint of satisfaction in Li Jianming’s voice. A pure mathematics concept he had casually suggested had, in the hands of this student, actually managed to break an engineering deadlock.
He put his reading glasses back on and lowered his head to look at the papers in his hand.
Chen Zhuo sat upright on the sofa, his hands clasped over his knees.
"Because of the non-disclosure agreement, I couldn’t include any of the specific engineering parameters. That’s why there are no physical units on these pages."
Chen Zhuo looked at Li Jianming.
"I’ve stripped away its physical shell completely. What’s left is a pure algebraic equation: a polynomial approximation of a manifold boundary."
Li Jianming nodded without speaking, his eyes already sweeping over the formulas.
At first, the old professor’s expression was relaxed.
Chen Zhuo’s handwriting was clear, and the logical progression of his derivation carried his usual clean, crisp style.
From defining a topological space, to establishing a vector field, to introducing a polynomial ring—every step was solid and well-founded.
Wu Tao, sitting beside them, craned his neck to get a look. But all he saw was a long string of symbols for non-singular algebraic varieties, so he wisely retracted his gaze.
The only sound in the office was the rustle of Li Jianming turning the pages.
As he turned to the third page, Li Jianming’s hand froze.
His gaze fixed on a derivation in the middle of the page.
For five or six seconds, time seemed to stand still.
Li Jianming’s brow slowly furrowed, his eyebrows nearly twisting into a knot between his eyes.
He leaned in closer, as if unable to believe what he was seeing, and reread the lines of formulas three times.
His once-relaxed facial muscles began to tighten, bit by bit.
Li Jianming abruptly raised his head, staring fixedly at Chen Zhuo on the sofa from behind the lenses of his reading glasses.
If a gaze could carry heat, Chen Zhuo would have been set on fire.
"What is this?"
Li Jianming jabbed his finger at the paper twice, hard, making the sheet crackle sharply.
Looking at Li Jianming’s slightly flushed face, Chen Zhuo maintained his calm and gentle composure.
"A first-order truncation."
Chen Zhuo replied quietly.
"I asked you, what is this!"
Li Jianming’s voice suddenly shot up an octave, laced with a frustrated, almost furious tremor.
Wu Tao jumped, nearly sliding off his chair. He had been with his advisor for years but had rarely seen Li Jianming this furious, especially not while reviewing a mathematical derivation.
Li Jianming snatched the paper, shaking it so hard it crackled loudly.
"I told you to find the symmetric beauty in algebra! I told you to view physics through the lens of a pure mathematician! And this is what you do?!"
Li Jianming shot up from behind his desk. Pointing at the formula on the paper, his finger trembled with rage.
"The derivation was going perfectly. You were just about to touch the very core of the manifold boundary, and you just take a knife to it right here?"
Li Jianming’s chest heaved with anger.
"This is an infinite-dimensional expansion! You get to this point, realize it won’t converge, and then—without so much as a warning—you take an axe and chop off all the higher-order terms? Do you think you’re butchering pork at a market? Just hacking off the parts you don’t want?!"
Chen Zhuo just sat there, not flinching or shrinking away, letting the old professor’s spittle fly through the air.
Wu Tao swallowed hard and tried to interject quietly.
"Professor, please calm down..."
"Calm down, my ass!"
Li Jianming shot Wu Tao a glare before turning back to Chen Zhuo.
"In physics and engineering, you people call this ’patching.’ You call it ’pragmatism’! As long as the machine runs, you’ll dare to add any kind of unconscionable truncation!"
Li Jianming slammed the paper onto the desk with a loud SMACK.
"But in mathematics, this is just being a thug! A hack! It’s a castle built on air! Without an underlying homology mapping to prove your truncation is even valid, everything you wrote before, no matter how elegant, is just a pile of garbage!"
Li Jianming’s roars echoed throughout the office.
In their eyes, mathematics was sacred, a discipline that demanded rigorous, interlocking proofs built one logical step at a time.
Chen Zhuo’s method—brutally truncating an infinite-dimensional series just to get a result—was nothing short of an insult to the entire discipline.
Chen Zhuo waited patiently for Li Jianming to finish venting.
He noticed the professor’s neck was slightly red with anger. He stood up, walked over to the water cooler, and got a new paper cup. After filling it halfway with warm water, he walked back to the desk and gently placed it by Li Jianming’s hand.
"Please, have some water first."
Chen Zhuo’s voice remained calm and measured, holding no trace of grievance or resentment from the scolding.
Li Jianming, breathing heavily, glanced at the cup but didn’t touch it.
Chen Zhuo withdrew his hand. He placed both palms on the edge of the desk, leaned forward slightly, and looked Li Jianming in the eye.
"Professor, everything you said is right."
Chen Zhuo looked the old professor straight in the eye, his tone utterly sincere.
"This kind of brute-force patching... it’s ugly, I admit. From a pure mathematics standpoint, it’s completely unpresentable."
Li Jianming snorted.
"At least you’re self-aware enough to know that."
"But."
Chen Zhuo’s tone shifted.
He extended a finger and lightly tapped the A4 paper on the desk, his fingertip resting right beside the first-order truncation formula.
"It worked."
Chen Zhuo looked at Li Jianming, his expression growing deep and serene.
"The supercomputer didn’t crash. After adding this ’rogue’ truncation—the one with no logical support—the matrix converged perfectly under the pressure of forty million virtual nodes. And the final data it produced is a perfect match with physical reality."

Comments

Loading...