Translator: Dreamscribe
"By next week, 3 P-sets (Problem sets, assignments), a differential geometry quiz, an algebraic number theory report.... I also need to organize my research meeting notes."
Just as he had heard, MIT's workload exceeded imagination.
Each P-set could easily be described as equivalent to three short papers.
For an average student, completing just one proof usually took about 15 hours. So it was only natural that wherever they sat down, everyone immediately started studying.
MIT students often described their academic life like this:
'Taking a drink from a fire hose.'
An unmanageable amount of knowledge poured in within the blink of an eye.
With no time to catch their breath, they had to learn new concepts, and if they couldn’t absorb them, they would simply be swept away.
Struggling to take in even one more gulp amid the overwhelming torrent of learning, this was what it meant to survive at MIT.
Seo-ha quickly scanned his calendar schedule and attached a post-it note.
[Wednesday afternoon – Pick up Seo-eun and help her with homework]
[Saturday morning – Gardening with family]
There were still many papers related to the Riemann Hypothesis that he had to read, and since he held shares, he couldn’t neglect his work at Spectra Works either.
Seo-ha was spending each day like a week, trying to drink up all the water shooting out of the fire hose.
***
Building 2, Room 203,
Ellie burst into the classroom in a rush and barely sat down just before the class bell rang.
Where had that beautiful version of her from the start of the semester gone?
Neat blouses, manicured nails, and hair that always shined.
Until now, she had never once given up grooming herself in front of the mirror.
But MIT had forced Ellie to choose between appearance and one hour of sleep.
She had to sleep, even a little, to survive.
"You're here."
Jason, holding his backpack like a treasure, greeted her.
Seeing his bloodshot eyes and greasy hair, Ellie gave herself credit for managing to take a shower even in her nonexistent spare time.
"Hello."
Seo-ha looked at Ellie and Jason with questioning eyes.
No matter how they were in the same department, they were overlapping in far too many classes. It was statistically impossible.
"Hi."
"We meet again."
Of course, this was no coincidence.
Ellie, driven by a sense of rivalry toward Seo-ha, had intentionally enrolled in the same classes as him, and Jason followed Ellie around.
Pretending to know nothing, she looked into her mirror and straightened her messy hair.
The class began.
Professor Whitman slowly walked to the center of the lecture room.
He carried nothing but a single piece of chalk.
"Today, let's talk about what a vector field is.
It's often described as ‘the direction in which a force acts’ or ‘the flow of energy’, but I want to explain it a little differently."
Whitman drew a small dot on the chalkboard and then an arrow next to it.
"I think of a vector field as a visualization of ‘where space wants to move’. Like drawing arrows in the direction air flows when the wind blows."
He continued to draw illustrations on the board one after another.
"When these arrows gather, they form a flow, a field. We mathematicians are the ones who read the patterns of that flow and discover the laws of change."
With the lecture material combining calculus, analysis, and linear algebra, students were tearing at their hair.
"Now let’s apply divergence and curl to this vector field.
Each of these tells us ‘how much space is spreading’ or ‘how much it’s twisting’."
He mercilessly moved his hand, writing out symbols.
The students were half out of their minds.
Jason muttered in a small voice.
"I don’t get what it even means mathematically for space to be twisting."
Ellie strongly agreed.
No matter how smart they were, for students who had just graduated high school, today’s lecture was practically torture.
‘Just write it down first.’
Figure out what it means later.
After studying for a few hours, they would probably be able to roughly grasp what the professor had said during the lecture.
Everyone except Seo-ha had the same thought.
Seo-ha only jotted down necessary information in his notebook intermittently and mostly kept his eyes on the chalkboard.
The arrows moved as if they were alive.
To Seo-ha’s eyes, the vectors being drawn on the chalkboard were flowing like the wind.
When one arrow passed through space, another arrow responded nearby.
Various energies intertwined and flowed together. The flow of such waves was so fascinating that Seo-ha didn’t even realize the professor had addressed him.
"Seo-ha!"
"...Yes?"
Seo-ha snapped back to his senses and stood up.
"What did you see on the board?"
Seo-ha hesitated for a moment and then answered truthfully.
"Life."
"Oh. Please explain in detail."
"At first, I thought it was just a flow of energy. But as each vector influenced the others, I saw the energy moving like a single living organism."
The classroom fell into silence.
‘Life?’
‘Organism?’
What was he talking about?
The students couldn’t understand Seo-ha’s words.
Whitman set down his chalk.
Then, after gazing at Seo-ha for a moment, he gave a gentle smile.
"Mathematics is often misunderstood as an isolated language, but in truth, every formula and symbol in mathematics presupposes interaction.
One vector moves another, and that movement creates yet another change. You could even call this the life or will of the world itself."
‘Of course, not just anyone can see that.’
Not wanting to discourage the students, he kept that last sentence to himself.
After a brief pause, Whitman continued speaking.
"I’ll think about what MIT can do for you, Seo-ha.
So don’t stop learning. Refusing to grow is a sin. Special talent comes with a corresponding responsibility."
Seo-ha quietly lowered his head.
"I will keep that in mind."
This university forced its students to grow.
Water rose from the floor every day.
So if one didn’t grow accordingly, before long, they would be unable to breathe.
However, this was the optimal environment for Seo-ha.
Everything he learned here was neither burdensome nor difficult for him.
Seo-ha was absorbing the vast waves of knowledge with his whole body. And that knowledge was being incorporated into the map of his mind, recombined like massive strands of genetic information.
Seo-ha was growing day by day in this place.
Whitman’s lecture continued.
Before long, the class was nearing its end.
"This semester’s team project will be ‘Dynamic System Modeling’ based on real data."
At the professor’s words, the students began murmuring.
"You’re free to choose the topic, but you must use real data."
Whitman began writing keywords on the chalkboard.
[City Traffic Flow Prediction]
[Human Body Temperature Regulation Modeling]
[Population Diffusion Simulation]
After writing around ten topics, Whitman set down the chalk.
"You must be able to explain the model design, assumptions, and interpretation process. Teams of three to five members, form your groups freely.
That will be all."
As soon as the professor left, everyone turned to look at Seo-ha.
Not just at MIT, but in the global mathematics community, the super rookie drawing all attention.
Everyone had the same thought.
‘If I team up with him, an A is guaranteed, right?’
Someone suddenly stood up from their seat.
"Seo-ha! Want to join our team?"
Three or four others rushed in almost at the same time.
"No, team up with me! I’ll seriously work hard!"
"I’m great at organizing data! My programming skills are top-notch too."
"Statistics and probability are my specialty. Before I came to MIT, I analyzed thesis data using R Studio."
The students all raised their voices one after another.
As students he had never spoken to before swarmed around him, Seo-ha became flustered and didn’t know what to do.
Thud, thud.
At that moment, Ellie grabbed her bag and boldly walked into the center. She pushed through the crowd in an instant and seized Seo-ha’s wrist.
“Go find someone else! He already has a prior commitment.”
The students looked at Seo-ha, as if asking if what she said was true.
Seo-ha, without realizing it himself, nodded.
“Too late.”
“Ellie, not bad, huh?”
“Next time, team up with us for sure.”
The students backed off, disappointment written all over their faces.
Outside the building, on a bench.
Click.
“Drink this.”
Ellie handed Seo-ha an orange juice from the vending machine.
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to misunderstand. It’s not like I wanted to work with you or anything.”
“Sorry?”
“It just pissed me off that everyone’s so two-faced. All they want is a free ride. I hate that kind of thing.”
Free-riding was one of the things Ellie despised the most.
‘Because I’ve experienced it way too much myself.’
“I really hate that too!”
Jason, who had approached at some point, jumped into their conversation.
“But Eleanor...”
“Call me Ellie.”
“Okay. Ellie, what topic were you thinking of doing? You too, Jason.”
“Me? Hmm... I think traffic flow prediction is the most interesting.”
Ellie answered after a brief thought.
“Really?”
Seo-ha’s eyes sparkled.
“Then would you like to team up with me?”
Seo-ha had a debt to traffic lights.
At the time, he had been too young to fully grasp the signaling system, but now he thought he might be able to.
“Sure? I’m totally fine with that. I’ll definitely do my part, so don’t worry.”
Ellie shrugged her shoulders.
“I... I love cars too! Let’s do it together!”
And just like that, a three-person team was formed.
But it wasn’t long before the two of them would regret today’s decision.
***
“Achoo!”
It was only September, but the weather was already getting chilly.
Jason, who had been standing at the intersection since dawn, recorded the time every time the signal changed.
“Isn’t Boston totally insane?”
It might be a city full of romance for tourists, but for the locals, the traffic was a nightmare.
"Why are the roads so twisted like this?"
Jason groaned as he checked the map app.
“It’s because Boston is the only city in the U.S. that grew without any planning.”
Ellie, who always got perfect scores in American history, raised her coat collar and explained.
“It expanded based on 17th-century carriage roads, so the signal system is all over the place... yeah, it’s a total mess.”
The roads were a chaotic mix of roundabouts and one-way streets, and the traffic signal rules differed at every intersection.
Some places gave left-turn signals first, while others had straight and left-turn signals come on simultaneously.
Even on the same street, the patterns in the morning and afternoon were completely different.
The three of them had requested data from the Boston Transportation Authority, but were denied due to security reasons.
The only data they were allowed to access were four types:
Traffic volume, average speed, congestion index, and documents related to the city's still-ongoing signal optimization project.
Seo-ha showed interest in that last set of documents.
It was a massive project with a budget of over 200 million dollars, but no visible results had been achieved yet.
“A signal optimization project, doesn’t that sound super cool?”
The other two shook their heads firmly.
“No.”
“Not at all!”
“I think it’ll make for a great paper. Optimizing the traffic in the world’s worst city? Just thinking about it makes my heart race.”
“Not for me.”
“Same here.”
But they had no choice but to be drawn in by Seo-ha’s enthusiasm.
It was a team that had formed around him in the first place.
“I don’t have what it takes to fix the signal system of a mega-city!”
Jason screamed.
“No one’s expecting that from you. Just record the data properly.”
Seo-ha tried to step in himself, but Ellie stopped him.
“You should use your brain. Leave the physical work to us.”
Seo-ha had a strangely sulky expression.
‘What exactly am I doing right now?’
Ellie fell into thought.
Trying to overhaul Boston’s traffic signals for a school assignment, anyone would think it was madness.
Even the Boston Transportation Authority, packed with the world’s best experts, hadn’t managed to pull it off.
And yet, she had accepted this project.
‘Why?’
As she thought more deeply, the reason became clear.
Ellie realized that she was expecting something from Seo-ha.