Yang Yong'an froze.
The young man wearing glasses froze too.
The air stood still for a few seconds.
"...The Hodge Conjecture?"
With a strange expression on his face, Yang Yong'an glanced at the blackboard, then at the young man. It was hard to tell whether he was looking at a lunatic or an idiot.
He had previously thought the man was merely an eccentric.
Apparently, ever since joining the International Mathematical Research Center, the man had shut out the world and buried himself in research no one could understand. Because he had failed to produce a single result, even his office had been cleared out for a newcomer.
Anyone who understood how the world worked would surely have resigned on his own initiative. But not this man. After being kicked out of his office, he had brought a little stool over and settled down here.
Whether he was genuinely oblivious or only pretending, he did not seem to feel bullied in the slightest. When people asked why he would not leave, he simply answered absently, "I like how quiet it is here," then went back to his work.
When Yang Yong'an first joined this Mathematics Center, a place teeming with hidden talent, he had thought the man was a scholar in the mold of Chen Jingrun, someone who would remain obscure until suddenly astonishing the world. But as time passed and Yang became familiar with the place, he gradually began to doubt that impression. Eventually, like the other colleagues here, he stopped treating the man kindly.
After all, two or three years had already passed. Counting the time the man had spent sitting here before that, it might have been four or five. Anyone who could not produce a single result in four or five years was no different from