My IQ has been increasing year by year.

Inside the Rutgers University mathematics department office building, the air conditioning was blasting, and the thick carpets in the corridors absorbed the sound of footsteps, making it remarkably quiet. Professor Arthur sat in his office, a cup of coffee that had gone cold in his hand.

His desk was piled high with several stacks of printed manuscripts, some of the edges of which were curled up.

As a senior editor of Discrete Mathematics, he reviews a large number of submissions every month.

The fluorescent light from the computer screen shone on his glasses. He rubbed his slightly sore eyes and tossed the forty-page graph theory manuscript back onto the table. "Another one of those unoriginal, exhaustive classifications."

Arthur leaned back in his swivel chair and muttered a complaint under his breath.

The authors of the paper I just read listed more than seventy subgraph structures in order to prove a lower bound on local connectivity. The proof process was not wrong, but reading it was like watching someone trimming the lawn of an entire golf course with nail clippers.

The office door wasn't closed properly; it was left a crack.

Thomas, a tall, thin middle-aged man, walked in from the next office carrying a mug with the school emblem on it.

"Are you still looking at those graph theory papers?"

Thomas pulled out a chair opposite Arthur and sat down, casually flipping through the thick stack of papers on the table.

"I heard you sighing in the hallway just now. Is the quality bad this quarter?"

"It's not just that it's not feasible, it's that it's too cumbersome."

Arthur took a sip of cold coffee, shook his head with a wry smile.

"Young scholars these days seem to be caught in a vicious cycle. They have a good computer, so they think they can solve all problems by exhaustive search. Their papers are full of complicated conditions and branches, with no mathematical beauty whatsoever." Thomas smiled and did not refute. He reached into the unread email basket on the corner of Arthur's desk and took an envelope.

The envelope had several China Post airmail stamps affixed to it, with the postmarks dated two weeks prior.

"Sent from China?"

Thomas glanced at the sender's address.

"Huaguo University of Science and Technology, if you don't want to see it, I'll tear it down for you and let you take a look?"

"Let's take it apart. I need to give my eyes a two-minute rest."

Arthur took off his glasses and slowly wiped them with a piece of velvet cloth.

Thomas casually picked up the paper cutter on the table and cut open the envelope.

There wasn't a thick stack of paper inside.

He pulled out only five thin sheets of A4 paper, formatted in a very basic English document style, without even headers, clean to the point of being rudimentary. "Only five pages?"

Thomas paused for a moment.

In today's graph theory papers, which often run to dozens of pages, five pages is far too short—it's as short as an unfinished research proposal. Arthur put on his glasses, somewhat surprised by what he heard.

"Can five pages really explain the lower bound of graph theory? Look at the title."

"Algebraic reconstruction of the lower bound of a certain type of bipartite graph".

Thomas read aloud the bolded text from the top line. After he finished, his gaze moved down the heading and landed on the main text. The office fell silent.

All that remained was the faint whooshing sound from the air conditioner vents.

Thomas's gaze lingered on the first page for about two minutes. His brows slowly furrowed, and his body, which had been casually leaning back in his chair, unconsciously leaned forward. He didn't turn the page; instead, he read the first page again from beginning to end.

"Arthur," Thomas's voice changed, the casual ease from before was gone, "You need to take a look at this."

Arthur noticed the change in his old colleague's expression, put down his coffee cup, and extended his hand.

Thomas handed over the five pages.

Arthur took the paper and his gaze fell on it.

The first paragraph is a very standard introduction, which briefly explains the current predicament of this issue in academia.

The language is very plain, using only the most basic English vocabulary, without any fancy clauses.

As Arthur continued reading, his gaze froze.

Instead of defining various subgraph structures as is the traditional approach, the author directly constructs an adjacency matrix at the end of the first page. "He defines the connectivity of the graph..."

Arthur muttered to himself, his gaze quickly sweeping over the second page.

The second page is filled with neatly formatted matrix derivations. The author uses the characteristic polynomials of matrices to forcibly pull topological problems, which originally required hundreds of classifications and discussions in geometric space, into a pure algebraic space without any logic.

There are no complicated graphical branches here.

Only the distribution pattern of eigenvalues.

Arthur turned the pages faster and faster.

On the third page, the author introduces a clever eigenvalue inequality scaling.

This scaling technique is common in algebra, but in this specific graph theory model, it's like a key fitting perfectly into a lock. Page 4, calculation complete.

Page five, a mere half-page, yielded the lower bound value that had baffled many scholars.

In the bottom right corner, a small black square is drawn, signifying that the proof is complete.

Not a single unnecessary word wasted.

There is not a single superfluous lemma.

Arthur finished reading the last symbol, placed the paper on the table, took off his glasses, rubbed his temples, and then put them back on.

"He bypassed the combined structure directly."

Arthur looked at Thomas across from him, his tone filled with delighted admiration.

"Using the spectral gaps of the matrix to constrain the lower bound of the graph is a method that has been tried before, but they all got stuck on the scaling of the boundary conditions. This person is too skilled in handling scaling, as if he often takes walks in this field."

"A very elegant algebraic entry point."

Thomas nodded in agreement.

"Clean and efficient, these five pages are worth more than all the forty pages of manuscripts on your desk combined."

Arthur picked up the first page and his gaze fell on the famous words below the title.

There were only a few simple words there:

"C. Zhuo".

Arthur read the name aloud.

"A scholar from Huazhong University of Science and Technology...this writing style is so sophisticated, it doesn't seem like something a young researcher would use to pad their output with word count. Have you heard of this person?" Thomas looked at the name, something seemed to flash through his mind, he frowned slightly, and tapped his fingers twice on the armrest of his chair. "Huazhong University of Science and Technology, C. Zhue..."

Thomas muttered to himself.

"Arthur, do you usually read preprints in the field of physics?"

"I don't usually look at them, and I don't really understand them. What's wrong?"

"A few months ago, Derian from Princeton published a preprint paper on physical singularities, which sparked considerable discussion because Derian used a very obscure algebraic structure to bypass the continuity deadlock when dealing with a manifold problem."

Thomas paused for a moment and looked at Arthur.

"In the acknowledgments section of Derian's paper, he specifically mentioned someone, saying, 'Thank you to C. Zhuo from Huazhong University of Science and Technology for the decisive ideas he provided in the construction of the algebraic model.'" Arthur was stunned.

Although he didn't study physics, he was well aware of Derian's standing in academia; a leading figure of that caliber would never casually include an insignificant name in the acknowledgments. "Providing the algebraic model..."

Arthur lowered his head again, looking at the five pages in his hand, all of which were derivations of graph theory using algebraic matrices. A reasonable deduction naturally formed in his mind. "So it was him."

Arthur nodded in sudden realization.

"That makes sense. This C. Zhuo must be a senior professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology with profound knowledge in both algebra and physics. This kind of seasoned and incisive problem-solving approach is definitely not something he painstakingly developed in graph theory. He is looking down from a higher dimension."

"I guess I just happened to do a little research on the lower bound problem in graph theory while I was teaching students recently."

Thomas leaned back in his chair, smiling.

"These kinds of digressions are a good thing for us; they save us a lot of time reading junk manuscripts."

"really."

Arthur picked up a red pen from the table and drew a circle in the upper right corner of the five pages.

There were no questions raised, nor were there any requests for lengthy and tedious combinatorial proofs. Faced with this logically autonomous and beautifully crafted manuscript with its superior tools, any suggestion for major revisions seemed nitpicking. "There's not much to change; just a little polishing of the layout will suffice."

Arthur placed the manuscript into the document box on the right, which indicated that it had been approved.

"The next fall issue is just missing a substantial short article, so let's leave it for him."

Thomas nodded, picked up his mug, and stood up.

"Then I won't bother you any longer. Keep reading your classification and enumeration. I hope you can find a few more of the old professor's casual writings today." Thomas joked as he walked out of the office.

Arthur looked at the thin manuscript from China on the table and was in a great mood.

He picked up the cup of cold coffee and took a sip, and suddenly even the bitter coffee tasted much better.