After using the restroom and washing his hands, Dewitt returned to his wheelchair, breathing somewhat heavily.
Song He watched him quietly, waiting for the answer to be revealed.
"Song He, you, me, and my lucky teacher—we're all fortunate," Dewitt said. "We possess intellectual gifts far beyond ordinary people. Our academic journeys were arduous but mostly smooth, and when it came time to choose our research topics, we were blessed with unparalleled luck and happened to pick directions we could complete in this lifetime."
"With all these factors piling up, we put on the crown of mathematicians. The history books will devote more or less some space to us, and we gained comfortable lives as well. Our efforts and talents were rewarded."
Song He nodded firmly. "Indeed."
"But we're among the lucky ones. There are still many nameless people in mathematics who weren't so fortunate," Dewitt said. "This world has a cruel selection process governed by fate. Much of the time, it's almost completely random—more random than flipping a coin. During wartime, for example, are the people who survive necessarily the bravest and wisest? Not at all. Those who died might have been braver and wiser; they were simply unlucky enough to be hit by a stray bullet."
"My teacher, Lambert, became famous because of me, his student. But in his later years, he often said that the most talented student he had ever taught wasn't me, but one of my senior fellow students, a man named John Quincy."
"Quincy..." Song He frowned as he searched his memories. As far as he knew, there was no one by that name in the Mathematics Circle.
"You can't remember him. He never publicly published any groundbreaking papers, and the papers he published early on were ordinary. After all these years, they were long