My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Chapter 270 Ah, Him

A coffee shop on the Princeton campus.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, there weren't many people in the shop. The barista was sitting in the back wiping down the coffee machine.

On the table in the corner by the window, there were several stacks of bound lists piled up haphazardly.

Mark sat on the inside of the table.

He held a pen in his hand, tapping it unconsciously on the table.

After tapping a dozen times, he stopped and rubbed his temples.

The dark circles under my eyes are very heavy.

Eric walked over carrying two cups of freshly made black coffee.

He pushed one of the glasses in front of Mark and pulled out the chair opposite him to sit down.

"Have a drink," Eric said.

Mark didn't touch the coffee.

His gaze fell on the piece of paper between the two of them.

That was a welcome flyer.

The top of the screen features the logo of the Princeton Undergraduate Mathematics Club, and the bottom of the screen displays a problem that combines Taylor expansion and higher-order integrals.

There were two clear creases in the middle of the flyer.

"Still nothing?" Mark's voice was a little hoarse.

Eric picked up his coffee and took a big gulp; the bitter taste made him frown.

He casually opened a folder next to him.

"No," Eric said.

"I've checked all the photos and information of the more than one hundred new students admitted to the mathematics department this year."

The folder was closed with a muffled thud.

"What about the physics department?"

"I've checked."

Eric leaned back in his chair.

"It's not just the physics department, but also the computer science department, and even the chemistry department's freshman lists. I spent half the night in the library yesterday looking through them, and I couldn't find anyone who matched."

Mark stared at the folded flyer.

"Special Recruitment List?"

"That was the first thing I checked."

Eric looked at him.

"There were only three Asians up there, two girls and one boy. The boy was seventeen years old, almost 1.9 meters tall, and looked like a bear. He didn't match the person from that day at all."

The table fell silent.

Only the coffee next to it was steaming slightly.

Eric looked at Mark's tired face.

"Are you still thinking about what happened that afternoon?" Eric asked.

Mark didn't say anything.

He is still thinking about it.

In the past few days, those few short minutes have been like an unstoppable loop of video recordings, playing over and over again in his mind.

That afternoon a few days ago.

The welcome square was packed with people, and the sunlight was blinding.

Mark sat behind the math club booth, holding a can of ice-cold Coke.

Several freshmen were gathered around the stall.

Holding flyers with the icebreaker challenge printed on them, they discussed it amongst themselves, their expressions shifting from initial curiosity to bewilderment, and finally to furrowed brows.

Mark watched their reactions and felt that the cola tasted even better.

He set that question.

As the club's vice president, he spent two days meticulously designing a trap.

He deliberately combined Taylor expansion and integrals, making a few detours in the middle.

He made a bet with the officer next to him, saying that the freshmen would not discover the complicated trap until tomorrow night at the earliest, and then they would be painfully spinning around on their draft paper.

Eric was on the roadside soliciting people with a stack of flyers.

Mark finished the last sip of his Coke and prepared to throw the empty can away.

Eric ran back from the crowd.

He was running very fast, without a sun hat, and his forehead was covered in sweat.

Mark thought he had recruited some amazing freshman.

"What's wrong?" Mark asked.

"Have you finished handing out the flyers?"

Eric did not answer.

He walked straight to the table and slammed the folded flyer he was holding onto it.

"Our question has a problem."

"Eric said, panting."

Mark stopped moving.

He looked at the flyers on the table, then at Eric.

"Are you kidding me?"

Mark frowned.

"Typesetting error? Impossible, I checked it twice before sending it to print."

"It's not about layout."

Eric swallowed hard.

"It's the question itself."

Mark found it a bit absurd.

"Who told you that?"

Mark pointed to the freshmen who were still scratching their heads in the distance.

"Them? Or were they just some upperclassmen passing by?"

Eric shook his head.

"Neither a freshman nor an upperclassman."

Eric braced himself against the edge of the table.

"He was an Asian boy who looked about fourteen or fifteen years old. I thought he was a junior high school student who came to visit the school with his parents."

Mark paused for a moment.

"A middle school student?"

"Yes," Eric said. "He took the flyer."

"and then?"

He looked at it for three seconds.

Eric held up three fingers, his tone dry and curt.

"Three seconds?"

Mark chuckled.

Did he understand the symbols in the question?

Eric did not laugh.

He looked into Mark's eyes.

He said that the factorial term in the denominator of the third row was missing an 'n'.

The smile on his face disappeared.

Mark looked down at the flyers on the table.

His gaze quickly swept over the third line.

To make the question more confusing, he constructed a polynomial there.

If it's handwritten, the 'n' is natural, but when typing and formatting, if the formatting is applied too quickly, it's possible to miss it.

This was a very subtle mistake.

Mark's heart beat a little faster.

"It was just a typo."

Mark looked up.

"It won't affect the overall problem-solving approach. Once freshmen get to that step in the derivation, they can fill in the gaps on their own."

He hasn't finished speaking yet.

Eric interrupted him.

Mark's brow furrowed even more.

"What else did he say?"

Eric pointed to the last line of the flyer.

He said that the integration domain here does not have a boundary definition in the real number range.

Eric repeated the boy's words exactly as they had spoken, without changing a single one.

"If there are no restrictions, this formula will collapse when it diverges to infinity."

The music in the welcome square was very loud.

But Mark couldn't hear anything at that moment.

He stared intently at the last line of the flyer.

Integral domain.

Boundary definition.

Divergent.

Mark grabbed a ballpoint pen from the table.

He flipped the flyer over and started writing directly on the blank back.

Instead of writing out those tedious derivation steps, he directly substituted the limit value of infinity.

The pen tip moves across the paper.

One line.

Two lines.

Mark stopped writing when he got to the third line.

He stared at the result on the paper.

collapsed.

The boy was right.

Because no boundary is defined, this integral cannot converge as it approaches infinity, becoming a complete dead end.

This is not a clever trap.

This is a wrong answer.

A useless problem where the foundation wasn't even laid properly.

Mark slowly raised his head.

Eric stood opposite him, looking at him.

"What were his exact words?"

Mark's voice became somewhat dry.

Eric glanced at him.

"He said that if our club's freshmen really calculated according to this formula, they would probably waste an entire weekend on scratch paper for a result that could not converge."

Mark didn't say anything.

He turned his head and looked at the stall in front of him.

The freshmen were still discussing it enthusiastically, and some had even started deriving the results in their notebooks.

They didn't know there was a cliff ahead.

Mark stood up.

He threw the ballpoint pen in his hand onto the table.

Then, he reached out and gathered together the stack of icebreaker challenge flyers that hadn't been handed out yet, along with the flyer on the back of which he had written equations on.

He picked up the stack of papers.

Turn around.

Walk to the trash can next to it.

Let go.

A large stack of flyers fell into the trash can with a dull thud.

Several officers looked at him in surprise.

The freshmen also stopped their discussion, puzzled.

Mark walked back to the table.

He looked at Eric.

"Go and reprint a new batch."

Mark said expressionlessly.

"Use last year's questions."

......

In the coffee shop.

Mark snapped out of his reverie.

He picked up the cup of black coffee in front of him, which had already gone cold, and took a sip.

It was so bitter it made me feel nauseous.

"That was indeed a fatal mistake."

Mark looked at the flyer on the table.

"At the time, I was only thinking about how to hide the Taylor expansion more deeply, and I completely ignored the most basic boundary conditions."

Eric nodded.

"It's not your fault," Eric said.

"When we do problems, many boundary conditions are given by default, and no one thinks of taking precautions in those places."

"This is not an excuse."

Mark shook his head.

"Wrong is wrong."

He paused.

"What I really can't stand is not that I made a mistake on the question."

Mark looked up at Eric.

"But he only looked at it for three seconds."

Eric did not refute.

These past few days, the two of them have been searching for this person like madmen throughout the entire Princeton undergraduate community.

Eric could recall the way the Asian boy spoke whenever he closed his eyes.

There was no boasting.

There was no contempt involved.

It's like stating the most ordinary thing.

"Could it be a relative brought by one of the professors?"

Mark asked, "This is the third time I've put forward this hypothesis."

"I asked Professor Davis in the department yesterday."

Eric sighed.

"What did he say?"

He told me to get out.

Eric helplessly spread his hands.

"He said if he had a fourteen-year-old relative who could mentally calculate the divergence domain of higher-order integrals in three seconds, he would have kept that person in his office long ago and would never have let him go to the square to pick up welcome flyers."

Both of them fell silent.

Mark rubbed his temples again.

"Could it be that they're not even from our school?" Mark wondered.

"Maybe they were just tourists passing through Princeton?"

Eric thought about what had happened that day.

"Not really," Eric said.

Why?

"Do you remember I told you that he was accompanied by an adult man?"

Mark nodded.

"You said that person looks like a butler."

"right."

Eric picked up his coffee cup.

"That's the only clue."

Eric carefully recalled the scene.

"The man was wearing a dark gray suit, perfectly tailored, with three pens in his breast pocket: black, red, and blue."

Eric gestured with his finger on the table.

"The curve of those three pens clipped to the pocket was so perfect, it was as if it had been measured with a ruler, they were absolutely parallel."

Mark frowned.

"What kind of clue is this?"

"Intuition," Eric said.

"That man's attitude was so strange. The way he looked at me was like I was an obstacle that could cause trouble at any moment. He stood directly in front of the boy and tried to drive me away."

Eric took a sip of coffee.

"But he didn't stop him; the boy came out and took the flyer himself."

Mark leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.

"A fourteen-year-old boy who can see through calculus traps in three seconds, and a cold-faced, obsessive-compulsive butler in a suit."

Mark muttered to himself.

"This sounds like a character from some cheap movie. We've been at Princeton for three years and we've seen students bring nannies to school and bodyguards to school, but we've never seen anyone bring a butler like this to school."

Eric did not respond.

I've gone through the whole list.

The professor has already asked.

All leads have gone cold.

They were like searching for a ghost in a vast campus.

The door to the coffee shop was pushed open.

The bell hanging on the door rang out with a clear, crisp sound.

A middle-aged man walked in.

He was wearing a jacket, carrying a black briefcase, and his hair was a little messy, as if he had just pulled his head out of a pile of documents.

He is Wilson, a lecturer in the mathematics department.

He usually teaches advanced algebra to second-year students and is very familiar with these key members of the club.

Wilson walked up to the bar and ordered an espresso.

While waiting for his coffee, he turned around and saw Eric and Mark sitting in the corner.

I also saw the list piled up like a small mountain on their table.

Wilson walked over.

He pulled out a chair from the table next to him and sat down.

Good afternoon, lads.

Wilson placed his briefcase on his lap.

"It's only been a few days since school started, but you all look like you've already pulled three all-nighters to prepare for final exams."

Eric managed a weak smile.

Good afternoon, Mr. Wilson.

Mark put down his pen and greeted him.

Wilson pointed to the lists on the table.

"Recruitment not going well?"

"Recruiting went very smoothly," Eric said.

"The number is 10% higher than last year."

"Then what are you worried about?"

Wilson looked at them.

"The air pressure at your table is so low that this cup of coffee could freeze."

Eric and Mark exchanged a glance.

They had been holding this in for several days and really needed to vent to someone.

"We're looking for someone," Mark said.

Looking for someone?

Wilson raised an eyebrow.

"Do I owe you money?"

"no."

Eric pushed the old flyer in front of Wilson.

"We are looking for the solution to this problem."

Wilson picked up the flyer and glanced at it.

"What's your icebreaker question for this year?"

Wilson glanced at the equation.

"Interesting. You deliberately omitted the integration domain? These freshmen are probably going to be in deep trouble."

"Didn't get scammed."

Mark said dryly.

"Oh?"

"Someone pointed out this loophole while handing out flyers," Mark said.

Wilson smiled.

"It seems that there are some promising students among this year's freshmen."

"Not a freshman," Eric said.

Wilson looked up at him.

"Who is that?"

"This is the question we've been searching for answers to these past few days."

Eric looked at Wilson.

"We went through all the lists and asked everyone we could, but we didn't find a single clue."

Wilson's curiosity was piqued.

The bartender brought over a freshly made espresso.

Wilson thanked him and picked up his glass.

Tell me about it.

Wilson took a sip of coffee.

"What does he look like? What's his name? Maybe I've seen him in class."

Eric took a deep breath.

"He looks like an Asian boy," Eric said.

Wilson nodded.

"About fourteen or fifteen years old."

Wilson paused for a moment, his hand holding the coffee cup still.

"Fourteen or fifteen years old?"

"right."

Eric was absolutely certain.

"He was small and not very big, wearing a very casual T-shirt. He took the flyer, looked at it for only three seconds, and pointed out the missing 'n' in the layout, as well as the problem of the divergence of the integral domain."

Wilson did not speak.

He slowly placed the coffee cup back on the table.

"Any other characteristics?" Wilson asked.

Eric thought for a moment.

"He was accompanied by someone."

"Who is it?"

"A white male, probably around forty years old, was wearing a dark gray suit, very well-tailored, with no wrinkles on the clothes, and three pens in his breast pocket, black, red and blue, with the pen clips perfectly parallel."

Eric described the scene from that day.

"The man was very cold, and he looked like a meticulous personal butler. He tried to push me away, but the boy stopped him."

After Eric finished speaking, he spread his hands.

"That's all the clues, Mr. Wilson. Do you think this child might be from one of the professors?"

Wilson looked at Eric.

Then he glanced at Mark sitting opposite him.

On the table, piles of worn-out lists of undergraduate students lay side by side.

Wilson suddenly smiled.

He leaned back in his chair and shook his head.

"So that's how it is."

Wilson's voice carried a sense of sudden realization.

"No wonder Professor Davis complained in the lounge the day before yesterday that you went to ask him if he had a fourteen-year-old relative. I thought you were doing some kind of sociological survey."

Eric was stunned.

Mark sat up straight as well.

"Teacher, do you know who we're looking for?"

Mark's voice immediately rose.

Wilson did not answer immediately.

He looked at these two young people, who were considered outstanding among undergraduates.

"Of course I know," Wilson said.

He pointed at Eric.

"The man you just described, wearing a dark gray suit and with three pens in his pocket, is not a private butler."

Wilson picked up his cup and finished the last bit of espresso.

"He is the administrative coordinator at the Institute for Advanced Study; his name is Woolley."

The café suddenly fell silent.

Only the faint sounds of collisions could be heard from afar.

Eric's eyes widened slightly.

Advanced Institute.

In Princeton, this word represents a completely different dimension.

There are no undergraduates there, no credits, and no final exams.

There was only a group of monsters there who didn't need to give lectures, but only needed to write on the blackboard every day.

"Administrative Specialist?"

Mark swallowed hard.

"And...what about the boy?"

Wilson pushed the empty coffee cup aside.

He looked at the welcome flyer on the table that had been marked.

"That boy's name is Chen Zhuo."

Wilson said the name in a calm tone.

"You can't find him because you're looking in the wrong place. He's not on the list of new students you have, nor is he on the list of specially recruited students."

Eric looked at Wilson.

"Where is he?"

"He's on the second floor of Van Een House."

Wilson picked up his briefcase.

"He just published a paper in the Annals of Mathematics a month ago that solved the tortuous part of the whole Hodge conjecture."

Wilson stood up.

"Now, he is Professor Pierre's last student, and Woolley is his personal assistant, specially assigned by the administration to take care of his daily life and schedule."

Wilson pushed the chair back into place.

He looked at the two people sitting there with blank expressions.

"Why don't you send an icebreaker question to someone who's working on the Hodge conjecture?"

Wilson chuckled softly.

"He didn't give you a lesson in algebraic geometry on the spot; he just pointed out the boundary issues. His temper was already very mild."

After Wilson finished speaking, he patted Eric on the shoulder.

"Stop looking, just put the list away."

He picked up his briefcase and turned to walk towards the entrance of the coffee shop.

The door was pushed open, and a bell rang.

Wilson went out, and the door slowly closed.

In the corner of the coffee shop.

The coffee on the table had gone completely cold.

Eric sat in the chair, remaining in the same position, motionless.

Wilson's words were replaying in his mind.

Annual Review of Mathematics.

Hodge's conjecture.

Professor Pierre's last student.

The second floor of Van En Building.

Each word felt like a mountain, crashing down on the thin list of new students in his hands.

Mark looked at the flyer on the table.

The equations on the flyer now looked like a not-so-funny joke.

Three seconds.

He had never understood why someone could calculate the divergence domain of a higher-order integral in three seconds.

Now he understands.

Because for that person, it doesn't require mental calculation at all.

This is like someone taking an elementary school math problem to an engineer who has just finished building a rocket engine.

Hey, do you know what three times five equals?

The other party did not feel offended and even kindly pointed out the numbers copied incorrectly in the question.

Mark's Adam's apple bobbed.

He slowly reached out and picked up the only old flyer on the table.

He didn't look at the stupid derivations he had written on the back again.

With both hands, he slowly crumpled the flyer into a ball.

Mark took the crumpled paper and turned around.

With a flick of his wrist, the crumpled paper traced an arc through the air and landed precisely in the nearby trash can.

He turned around and looked at Eric, who was also silent.

All obsessions.

All the frustration.

All those ridiculous thoughts of trying to find that person and compete with them over the past few days.

Faced with an absolute dimensional difference, everything vanished into thin air.

They don't even have the right to be jealous.

Mark picked up the glass of cold black coffee on the table and drank half of it in one gulp.

The bitter taste spread in my mouth.

He slammed the cup down.

"Eric".

Mark's voice was dry.

Eric slowly raised his head.

"Inform everyone."

Mark stared at the pile of names that looked like scraps of paper.

"This year's ice-breaking challenge has been cancelled."

Eric nodded.

"it is good."

"The afternoon's orientation activities have also been changed," Mark said.

"Change it to what?"

Mark leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.

"Let's just go get pizza instead."

Mark said dryly.