Young Man!

Oh well, forget it. Maybe I'll run into him again the next time I go to the provincial library.

Lin Lan consoled herself.

She forced a smile at Dr. Xu. "Dr. Xu, about the correction..."

"I'll make it. I'll get right on it."

Although Dr. Xu felt awful, he could still think clearly when it came to academics.

For someone who had earned a doctorate in the mathematics department at Moscow State University, respect for scholarship was engraved in their DNA.

Wrong was wrong. Professor Smirnov had spoken, and if Dr. Xu still refused to admit it, he really would be disgracing himself all the way to Moscow.

"Then I'll go back and redo the typesetting. We'll add the correction in the next printing." Lin Lan nodded and prepared to get up.

"Wait a moment."

Dr. Xu asked thoughtfully, "Did that young man only read Konrod's book at the library?"

"He said he was actually looking for works by several people. If I remember correctly, they were all from the Soviet era."

"Oh? Whose works was he looking for?"

Lin Lan tried her best to repeat the four tongue-twisting names. "Adelson-Velsky, Landis, Brudno, and Arlazarov."

"What did you say?" Dr. Xu could hardly believe it. "He was looking for works by those four?"

"Yes, that's what he said." Lin Lan was a little puzzled. "What's wrong?"

Dr. Xu did not answer immediately. Instead, he stood up and walked over to an old bookcase in the corner of the study.

The bookcase was completely different from the neat furniture in the living room. It had an iron-gray metal frame and several yellowed Russian labels stuck to its glass doors. At a glance, it was the kind of old-fashioned filing cabinet a university would have discarded.

He opened the door to reveal a jumble of folders and kraft-paper bags crammed inside.

"Velsky, Landis, Brudno, Arlazarov..." Dr. Xu muttered as he searched. "Those people were all little-known giants in Soviet-era computational mathematics. In this country, never mind finding people who study them-you couldn't even scrape together a hundred who have heard their names."

"Did that young man say what he wanted them for?"

Lin Lan shook her head. "He didn't go into detail. He just said he was looking for their original papers. I helped him find one by Brudno in the provincial library's collection of Soviet literature, but I don't know about the others."

Dr. Xu lowered his head, lost in thought, then pulled a kraft-paper bag from deep inside the bookcase.

"This..."

He set the bag on the table, untied its string, and took out a stack of slightly yellowed papers.

Lin Lan leaned closer and saw that they were all Russian printouts. Their edges were uneven, and they were clearly quite old.

At the top of each page, a different Russian name and year had been written by hand.

"Back then, I was full of ambition. When I was preparing to translate and publish that Soviet computational mathematics series, I emailed the professors at Moscow State University and told them about the publishing plan."

"Most of them politely said they supported it, and that was the end of it. But there was one old professor in the same department as Professor Smirnov. I can't remember his name at the moment-you know how hard their names are to remember."

Lin Lan nodded in wholehearted agreement.

"This old professor took it very seriously and sent me a long email."

"What did he say?"

Dr. Xu stopped turning the pages.

"'These people devoted their lives to science, but because of the times they lived in, much of their work was never formally published and circulated only as internal technical reports.'"

"'Western academia discovered their results and used them, yet rarely mentioned their names. If you truly intend to do this, please put their names where readers can see them, so that more people will know they existed.'"

"So these..." Lin Lan looked hesitantly at the stack of papers on the table.

"The old professor gave me all of them. Don't worry, none of these are classified documents. He wouldn't have been able to get his hands on classified documents anyway. As I recall, there are several of Arlazarov's early technical reports in here, as well as an internal paper on search-tree balance coauthored by Landis and Velsky."

"I didn't use all of them when I was organizing the material back then, so I kept the rest, thinking I'd sort through them when I had the chance."

"And then I kept putting it off, and a few years went by."

"May I take the material on those people with me?" Lin Lan asked tentatively.

"Not so fast." Dr. Xu put the scans back in the kraft-paper bag. "These are very old. I never got the page order right for some of them, and a few were scanned very poorly. I'll have to check them again before I can confirm whether they're complete."

He added, "I'll find some time to sort them out. When I'm done, I'll give you a call."

Lin Lan was overjoyed.

"That's wonderful! Dr. Xu, I'll leave it to you, then!"

"It's nothing. Ah, if only we could systematically organize Soviet literature the way the United States does."

"The United States has become the place with the richest collection of Soviet literature. Can you believe it?"

Dr. Xu looked displeased as he surveyed the bookshelves filling the room.

"As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed in the nineties, those Americans were like sharks that had smelled blood. In public, they waved the banner of a beacon; behind the scenes, they charged straight into Moscow carrying cases full of dollars. Not only did they use every trick and deception to poach top scientists who couldn't even put food on the table, they also hauled truckload after truckload of internal manuscripts and journal literature from the basements of research institutes back to the United States!"

Dr. Xu gave a cold laugh and shook his head. "During the Cold War, the Americans mocked the Russians' clunky computers in public every day, saying their system couldn't produce decent information technology."

"And what happened? Behind the scenes, they copied their work and fleeced them harder than anyone! They took Soviet mathematical logic, dressed it up in a new form, slapped English academic terminology on it, and turned around and published it in top international journals as their own original innovation."

"Take the world's first stealth fighter, the F-117 Nighthawk, which the Americans bragged to the skies about back then. Do you know where its core stealth technology came from?"

Lin Lan was startled and shook her head. She worked in social science publishing; what did she know about stealth fighters?

"The whole damn thing came from a public paper by a Russian mathematician!"

"In the sixties, there was an obscure Soviet mathematician named Pyotr Ufimtsev. He published a paper called 'Behavior of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction' in a completely obscure academic journal in his own country. In it, he used pure mathematics to derive a set of equations for calculating the radar cross section of an object's surface."

"The Soviet censors were idiots too. They misjudged it, thinking it was just a bunch of pure mathematical symbols that weren't worth a damn for building real planes and guns. They didn't even stamp it classified; they just published the paper openly. And what happened?"

"In 1971, an intelligence officer named Wright translated it into English. An engineer at the Lockheed Corporation happened to come across the translation in a library and was immediately awestruck, treating it like an incredibly rare treasure!"

"You mean... American stealth fighter technology came from the Soviet Union?"

"Of course! American computers were lousy back then too. They couldn't calculate the radar reflectivity of complex, streamlined curved surfaces at all. But with Ufimtsev's set of extremum equations, they discovered that as long as they designed the aircraft's exterior entirely from angular flat surfaces, they could use those formulas to calculate and control the direction of radar-wave scattering perfectly!"

Dr. Xu heaved a long sigh. "You saw what happened. The Americans built a stealth fighter that stole the show in the Gulf War. The whole world fell to its knees, convinced that America's aviation black technology was the best in the world. But who knew that the ancestor of that stealth technology had been worked out by a Soviet mathematician on scraps of paper while he was stuck on the sidelines?"

"That's a classic case of the Russians planting the tree and the Americans picking the peaches!"

"So never underestimate these theoretical manuscripts from the Cold War that were never turned into physical products."

"Hardware is limited by its era, but pure, top-tier mathematical logic never goes out of date."

"There aren't many people left who can understand that idea now. If our people could make good use of it, what would the United States amount to today?"

Dr. Xu still felt he had more to say after all that. He turned to Lin Lan, who had been listening in a daze, and said, "Ms. Lin, if you get the chance, introduce me to that young man. We might just hit it off!"

Lin Lan didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

You're such a Soviet fanboy. Don't go scaring him off when the time comes!

P.S. Please keep reading and send monthly votes and recommendation votes. Please, everyone, don't stockpile chapters-the number of people following along is very important to this book! Also, I updated early today to qualify for tomorrow's recommendation. Tomorrow's update will still be at 23:00!