Classmate, Wake Up!

After finishing his spicy strips, Shen Qi continued constructing regular polygons inside the concentric circles he had drawn.

A perfect geometric pattern slowly unfolded beneath Shen Qi's 2B pencil.

He kept inscribing regular polygons in the circle. Shen Qi was using the "Method of Exhaustion": by successively drawing regular polygons inside the circle, he was exhausting its area.

The ancient Greeks had first proposed this geometric construction method. The British later improved it and named it the "Method of Exhaustion."

This ancient mathematical method was still useful in the twenty-first century. Seventeen-year-old Chinese high school student Shen Qi had used it skillfully to find the circle's diameter.

The square root of three over two.

Shen Qi wrote down the answer. It was a very simple number, but to arrive at it, he had snapped a 2B pencil and filled the exam paper with his proof.

After checking it twice and finding no problems, Shen Qi handed in his paper.

Three hours had passed since the exam began at nine. It was exactly noon.

"Young man, Shen Qi, this is the National Finals. You're handing in your paper an hour and a half early. Don't you want to check it again?" The proctor took Shen Qi's paper and quickly glanced through it.

"I've checked it twice. It's fine. I want lunch—the proper kind." Shen Qi was hungry again. Maybe it was because he was growing during puberty; he seemed to get hungry especially easily.

"Once you hand in your paper and walk out that classroom door, there's no taking it back," the proctor reminded him one last time.

"I'll just do my best and let nature take its course." Shen Qi glanced at the work badge hanging from the proctor's chest. His surname was Liu, and he was a cadre of the Chinese Mathematical Society.

Shen Qi politely said, "Still, thanks for the warning, Cadre Liu. But I'm hungry."

"All right, off you go. Good luck, Shen Qi." Cadre Liu put Shen Qi's National Finals paper into an exam envelope and sealed it.

"Math has never depended on luck, only ability." Shen Qi suddenly remembered those words. His homeroom teacher, Zhang Wanbang, had said them to him.

Cadre Liu's face darkened. "You can go now, Shen Qi. Weren't you hungry?"

The other nine contestants in the classroom were extremely nervous.

"Damn it, handing in his paper an hour and a half early. What a show-off." The contestant from the Ebei Province Math Olympiad team clenched his pencil between his teeth, his brow furrowed. He had also scored full marks in the National Preliminary, but he was stuck on the second Analytic Geometry problem in the first half of the National Finals.

"Where'd this freak come from? Does he die if he doesn't show off?" The contestant from the capital's Math Olympiad team especially hated unknown jerks who loved showing off. He was stuck on the second problem too.

"Heh, maybe he handed in a blank paper. Heh, psychological warfare, huh? I won't let it get to me." The contestant from the Xiangnan Province Math Olympiad team was fairly optimistic and had nerves of steel. Three hours had passed, and he hadn't solved a single problem.

"Ugh... trash... I... I... screw you..." The contestant from the Zhedong Province Math Olympiad team suddenly felt dizzy. His vision went black, and he collapsed onto his desk.

"Hey!"

"Wake up!"

The proctors panicked. They immediately began administering first aid to the contestant from the Zhedong Province Math Olympiad team, pinching his philtrum and pressing his temples.

"Cadre Liu, contestant number 52 in the National Finals has fainted!"

"He might have been too nervous and gone without water or food. He fainted from hunger!" The proctors reported the situation to the person in charge of the room, Cadre Liu.

Cadre Liu made an immediate decision. "Carry him out and call the medical staff right away!"

The exam room descended into chaos as contestant number 52 in the National Finals was carried out.

"Is he all right?" Shen Qi stood in the doorway, asking with concern.

"Shen Qi, I order you to leave the exam area immediately! Get as far away as you can, or your National Finals results will be void!" Cadre Liu was frantic too. He blamed himself: Why had he bothered chatting with that kid Shen Qi? He'd talked the other contestants into fainting.

"Is it my fault?" Shen Qi shrugged and left the exam area, looking completely innocent.

The National Finals paper was a whole level harder than the National Preliminary. The hardest problem was the second one.

So far, Shen Qi was the only person in the room to solve the second problem's imaginary ellipse. It was so difficult that it had even made one contestant faint.

Shen Qi walked out of the second teaching building. The air outside was so fresh! The sun was shining brightly over the capital today, and, unusually, there was no smog.

He looked around. Hey, it seemed he was the first to hand in his paper in the first half of the National Finals. None of those guys on the Ebei team who could play blindfold Go had come out. One guy from the Zhedong team had even fainted. Poor thing.

Shen Qi sent a text to Teacher Tian, the team leader: "Done. Going to eat."

Teacher Tian replied instantly: "Find lunch for yourself. Your teammates are still working hard."

Shen Qi: "I'm so bored."

Teacher Tian: "Go out the school gate and turn left. There's a baozi shop."

Shen Qi: "Teacher Tian, I want to drink top-scorer-and-first-place congee, but I don't know the capital well. Where can I find it?"

Teacher Tian stopped replying.

"So boring!" Shen Qi grabbed a quick bite in the school cafeteria, then went back to the dorm to read and sleep.

Shen Qi had raised his Math Level to level 5, further improving his powers of deduction, insight, and judgment in mathematics.

That didn't mean he could stop reading and studying just by raising his subject level. The system improved Shen Qi's thinking abilities, but he had to build up his everyday knowledge himself. The more, the better.

Over the past few months, Shen Qi had read all the books from the undergraduate Mathematics Department curriculum at least once. He had read some branches several times.

In the face of the giant that was mathematics, Shen Qi was still just a baby. There were many branches of mathematics he had only barely touched—or never touched at all.

"The more books you read, the more you realize how little you know." Shen Qi leafed through an issue of the Mathematical Herald. It was published by the Chinese Mathematical Society, and one of the magazines he subscribed to.

This issue of the Mathematical Herald had an excellent paper by a mathematics doctoral student at Yanjing University. He offered new insights into Functional Analysis and applied them to quantum research in multidimensional space.

When he got to Quantum Mechanics, Shen Qi couldn't understand it. Although mathematics was the language used to describe Quantum Mechanics, you still had to understand what Quantum Mechanics was for and what it studied.

The discipline that intersected most often with mathematics was probably physics. It was hard to say whether Mathematical Physics belonged to mathematics or physics, even though it was included in the Mathematics Department curriculum.

Mathematical Physics was Shen Qi's weak point. He did have weak points, even in mathematics.

"Bro, you're still calling yourself ignorant? If you're ignorant, then the rest of us are idiots." Someone entered the dorm room. It was Qi Jianhong.

Shen Qi closed the Mathematical Herald and asked, "Jianhong, you're back. How did it go?"

"The first problem was insanely tricky. I don't play Go, and I don't even know the rules, so I left it blank. The second problem, Analytic Geometry, looked ordinary at first glance, but the more I thought about it, the more terrifying it got. I left that blank too. For the third problem, Plane Geometry, I used the Method of Exhaustion to find a diameter: the square root of three over two. No idea if I guessed right." Out of the three problems, Qi Jianhong had only solved one, but he didn't look discouraged. He had done his best.