Hearing Cheng Wei’s question, the short-haired girl next to Qi Yu spoke up before she could.
"Haven’t you heard? There’s a guy from Yuanpei named Li Dong. He pushed that... what’s-it-called... Riemann something-or-other... to 10 to the 23rd power, and apparently even broke a world record."
She spoke vaguely. It was obvious she wasn’t a math student and had no real understanding of such technical terms, having only skimmed a post about it on the school forums.
"That must be him, right?"
She hadn’t spoken loudly, but the seminar room was small enough that everyone present heard her.
They didn’t have any concrete concept of what "pushing something to 10 to the 23rd power" meant.
After all, as people who worked with chemistry, the numerical units they dealt with daily were things like moles. They were on a completely different wavelength from computational number theory.
But they did understand the phrase "broke a world record."
Someone who could break a world record had to be pretty amazing, right?
Seeing their blank expressions, Gu Ming scoffed internally.
’Still talking about non-trivial zeros...’
’Ever heard of Montgomery’s Conjecture on Association?’
’You know of the Mathematical Annals, right?’
’The reviewers were Tao Zhexuan and Katz. Get what that means?’
’Forget it. You wouldn’t get it even if I told you.’
Li Dong heard Gu Ming, and though he didn’t know this upperclassman, the guy had addressed him directly. He had to respond.
"Hello."
He gestured in Qi Yu’s direction.
"Just came over to help a friend and see what was going on."
Gu Ming nodded, then sighed.
He then briefly explained what had just happened.
Qi Yu’s research group had run into a problem. Professor Zhang Lufang hadn’t been feeling well recently, and they were stalled on the mathematical modeling. So, they contacted Professor Liu Ruochuan to recommend someone, and Liu Ruochuan recommended Gu Ming.
"So this is what I don’t get," Gu Ming said, growing more irritated as he spoke.
"They asked me to help, I gave my advice, and if they don’t want to listen, fine. But to tell me I’m wrong to my face?"
Over on the other side, Cheng Wei had actually calmed down and realized he had been out of line earlier.
After all, the guy was really there to help. Even if they had different opinions, there was no need to confront him so directly.
He just couldn’t stand Gu Ming’s attitude.
A math student with a constant "you chemists are inferior" look on his face.
So he kept quiet.
After Gu Ming finished speaking, he looked at Li Dong.
"Junior, you be the judge."
Now, all eyes turned to Li Dong.
Li Dong smiled and nodded.
Then he started cursing up a storm in his head.
’Me, be the judge? How am I supposed to judge this?’
’I understood all the math parts of what you just said.’
’Fitting a random process with a deterministic ODE, the construction logic of a Markov SDE—I get all that.’
’But the chemistry side?’
’What’s this about conformational state transitions, substrate concentration feedback effects...’
’I don’t even have all the terminology straight. How the hell am I supposed to judge?’
When it came to playing the part of a profound expert, he considered his act flawless.
So, Li Dong gave a natural smile, his gaze sweeping casually toward Qi Yu.
He said nothing.
Qi Yu met his gaze, her expression impassive.
But inside, she was already roasting him.
’You didn’t understand, did you?’
’You didn’t get the chemistry part at all, right?’
She knew this junior of hers had only been exposed to chemistry for a short time, and the questions he’d asked before were unrelated to the direction of this project.
’He probably didn’t even get the terminology.’
Qi Yu sighed internally.
So, using the simplest language possible, she went over the core chemistry concepts for Li Dong.
She explained what enzyme conformational dynamics meant: an enzyme molecule isn’t a rigid sphere; it jumps back and forth between multiple conformations.
Each conformation has a different catalytic efficiency, and the jumping isn’t completely random. The previous conformation affects the probability of the next one appearing.
This was what Cheng Wei meant by "non-Markovian" having memory.
Then there’s the feedback from substrate concentration. The substrate isn’t a passive background parameter; it actively changes the enzyme’s conformational distribution.
"Simply put, the system is dynamic, has memory, and is influenced in turn by its environment."
After explaining, Qi Yu glanced at Li Dong.
Li Dong still wore that same placid expression.
But in reality, his mind was exploding.
His 0.4 Basic Attributes were all maxed out.
Qi Yu’s words, "conformational transitions have memory," automatically translated in his mind into integro-differential equations with a memory kernel.
"Substrate concentration feedback" translated into an external field parameter coupled into the state transition probability.
Qi Yu finished.
Li Dong spent a few seconds mentally connecting all the pieces.
He couldn’t possibly understand every single aspect of this project.
He truly didn’t know the experimental details of the chemical system, and it was impossible to grasp it 100% in such a short time.
Understanding eighty to ninety percent of it was already quite an achievement.
But the point they were arguing about—that, he now completely understood.
And he was a little speechless.
’Seriously...’
’You two were arguing so intensely, but you were talking completely past each other?’
Gu Ming saying, "fitting a random process with a deterministic ODE is unreliable," was correct. That was his mathematical intuition.
Academician Xie Xiaoliang proved this point with single-molecule fluorescence experiments over twenty years ago.
He had grasped the mathematical essence of the system.
Cheng Wei saying, "your Markov model ignores the memory effect and substrate feedback," was also correct.
The experimentally observed phenomena were right there; you couldn’t just dismiss them with a single phrase like "mathematical intuition."
So where was the problem?
Gu Ming was saying, "You chose the wrong tool to begin with; you need to change it."
Cheng Wei was saying, "This new tool you’ve switched to is also wrong because it doesn’t fit our chemical system."
One was attacking the old framework.
The other was refuting the new model.
The two of them weren’t even talking about the same thing.
Li Dong looked at Gu Ming.
"Senior Gu Ming."
"Yeah."
"I have no objection to your judgment just now that using a deterministic ODE to fit an inherently random enzymatic catalysis process is unreliable."
Li Dong paused for a moment.
"To be honest, the chemistry group here has been working on this project for a long time without noticing the problem with the ODE framework itself. Yet you saw it as soon as you arrived."
"To be able to pinpoint a flaw in the choice of the underlying mathematical framework just by looking at the experimental data from a chemical system... that’s a kind of insight not just anyone has."
This wasn’t flattery.
It was a fact.
Gu Ming was taken aback for a second.
He’d been praised by many people, of course, but rarely had anyone praised him so... well, objectively.
And it was praise from such a ridiculously brilliant big shot.
For a moment, Gu Ming even felt like he’d been underrated.
’Maybe... I should also submit to the Mathematical Annals?’
Just as he was getting carried away, Li Dong asked a question.
"But, Senior, can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"The SDE model you built, it uses the standard Markov assumption, right?"
Gu Ming nodded.
"Okay, then what do you think..."
Li Dong’s tone was very casual, as if they were just chatting.
"If, in a system, the conformational relaxation time is more than an order of magnitude longer than the catalytic turnover time... in that situation, does the memoryless assumption still hold?"
Gu Ming’s expression changed.
The core of a Markov process is its memorylessness.
But if the relaxation time is much greater than the turnover time...
Then the historical path of conformational transitions would have a non-negligible effect on the current state.
In other words... the system is inherently non-Markovian.
So for him to use a Markov assumption to describe a non-Markovian system...
Mathematically, it was self-consistent, of course.
But what it described was no longer the chemical system in front of them.
Gu Ming froze.
He was a genius, too.
The instant Li Dong finished that sentence, he understood everything.
Those things Cheng Wei had said earlier... non-Markovian transitions, substrate feedback effects—they were all pointing to this.
It’s just that Cheng Wei couldn’t explain it clearly in rigorous mathematical language.
So it sounded like he was using "Chemical Intuition" to negate "mathematical rigor."
And at the time, he had been mocking him in his head, ’You can’t even state the mathematical definition of a non-Markovian process, so what right do you have to refute my model?’
Looking back now,
the guy had been right.
There was just a problem with the translation.
And for some reason, he felt his mind was suddenly a bit clearer than usual.
Gu Ming ignored everyone else.
He turned, walked to the whiteboard, and snatched up a marker.
He crossed out the standard Markov SDE framework he had drawn earlier.
Then he started writing anew beside it.
Conformational transitions were no longer represented by a constant transition probability matrix, but by a semi-Markov process instead.
The waiting time between transitions was no longer an exponential distribution but a general distribution, which inherently included a memory effect.
The substrate concentration was no longer a fixed background parameter but was explicitly coupled into the expression for the transition probability as an external field variable.
He wrote for nearly twenty minutes.
The whiteboard was densely packed with formulas.
After he finished, Gu Ming put down the marker and stared at the whiteboard as if verifying his work.
"Oh... so that’s how it is."
Then he turned around and looked at Cheng Wei.
"Come take a look at this."
"Model the conformational transitions with a semi-Markov process, and couple the substrate concentration into the transition probability as an external field."
"If you recalculate based on this framework, your experimental data should match up."
Cheng Wei walked over.
A few other students working on the project also gathered around.
The short-haired girl reacted the fastest.
She hurried back to the table, pulled out a data sheet, and began to check the calculations on her calculator.
Cheng Wei followed her.
"This... It looks like it really does match up."
While they were busy verifying, Li Dong had quietly made his way to Qi Yu’s side.
"Senior Sister, I’m going to head out then."
Qi Yu’s mind was still spinning.
She was the most skilled member of this research group.
While her math couldn’t compare to Gu Ming’s, let alone Li Dong’s, it was by no means poor.
When Li Dong asked Gu Ming that question about relaxation time and turnover time, she had actually thought of it too.
Normally, she might have needed to ponder it for a while to figure it out, but for some reason, her mind was exceptionally clear today, and she was thinking much faster than usual.
She was still mulling over these things in her head when she heard Li Dong say he was leaving.
"Oh, okay. Thanks, Junior."
She replied subconsciously.
By the time she truly snapped back to reality, Li Dong was almost out the door.
It wasn’t that Li Dong wanted to do a good deed and leave without a trace.
The main reason was...
What if, while they were verifying the experimental data, they threw out another pile of chemistry terms he didn’t understand?
What if someone asked, "Junior, what do you think the appropriate coordination number for this set of characterization data is?"
If he couldn’t answer,
wouldn’t his whole persona collapse?
So, without any hesitation, he turned and left.
Just as he stepped out of Seminar Room 317,
his phone rang.
He took it out and looked.
Liu Ruochuan.
"Hello, Professor."
"I need you to come over to the Science Building No. 1."
Over the phone, Liu Ruochuan’s voice sounded quite happy.
"There’s an interview."

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