101: Chapter 101 The World Begins to Recognize It

2:00 AM, German time.

Technical University of Berlin, Computational Geometry and Combinatorial Algorithms Laboratory.

Klaus had not closed his eyes for over thirty consecutive hours.

On the six screens in front of him were rolling terminal logs and dense JSON structure trees.

Three days ago, when he first used the verification package provided by Jiang Lin—referred to as MPS—and ran it within a radius of R=10 to produce a green NO PERIODIC PATCHES FOUND, he said a word in a private group of only seven or eight top algorithm researchers.

"This is not nonsense."

But that night, his advisor—the head of the laboratory and an old professor who had been working in combinatorial optimization for thirty years—called him into his office.

The old professor asked him only one question.

"The code you're running, is it written by him?"

Klaus nodded.

The old professor shook his head.

"That is not called replication."

Klaus froze.

"Klaus, have you ever thought about it? What if there's an error hidden in his proof that even he didn't realize? And coincidentally, there's also a bug hidden in the verification code he wrote that happens to cover up this error?"

"Then if you run his code ten thousand times, until the end of time, what you see will always be his pretty green text."

"You are not verifying the truth. You are repeating the same mistake he might have made."

Klaus instantly understood his advisor's meaning, a cold sweat breaking out on his back.

To truly and independently verify this tile, the only way was to throw Jiang Lin's clean and neat MPS package aside.

And take only the shape definitions written in pure mathematical language from that paper, the four types of macro-block substitution rules, and the boundary reading conventions.

Then, starting from a blank line of code, using an entirely different language and a completely different underlying framework, recreate the entire verification system from scratch.

If two systems built from scratch, sharing not a single line of code between them, ultimately spat out results that aligned perfectly...

...only then would it be called replication.

Only then would it be called the truth.

So, for the past three days, Klaus hadn't touched Jiang Lin's Python.

He used Rust, rewriting it brick by brick, starting from the algebraic integer encoding of vertex coordinates.

He implemented state generation himself, wrote his own hashing, and performed equivalence class merging on his own.

He even intentionally used an internal naming convention completely different from the paper, just to force himself to truly understand the mathematics behind every step, rather than mindlessly copying it.

Error, debug, rerun.

Error again, rerun again.

Now, at 2:00 AM.

The Rust system he wrote himself, running on the four-socket AMD compute node in the Berlin laboratory, had just finished the full enumeration of the local condition table.

In the last line of the terminal, a number popped up.

The final total number of surviving irreducible states.

With trembling hands, Klaus opened another window.

That was the theoretical total number of states claimed by Jiang Lin, transcribed verbatim from the data table in the appendix of Jiang Lin's paper.

Two numbers: one from China, and one from the server in the Berlin lab that had just been roaring for three days.

They matched, down to every single digit.

Not just the total count.

Klaus had both systems output the polynomial hash fingerprints for each equivalence class, then ran a line-by-line diff.

Zero differences.

Over four thousand states, and not a single one failed to match.

Klaus didn't cheer.

He was completely exhausted, lacking the strength to cheer.

Leaning back in his chair, he looked up at the pale fluorescent lights on the lab ceiling, letting out a dry, raspy wheeze from his throat.

Then he remembered his own contemptuous chuckle when he first saw that author affiliation.

Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

A high school in China.

"Gott."

Klaus cursed under his breath in German, then posted a screenshot of that diff result into the group chat.

Below it, he attached only one sentence, in all caps:

INDEPENDENT REIMPLEMENTATION IN RUST. ZERO SHARED CODE. ALL STATE HASHES MATCH.

IT HOLDS.

...

Almost within the exact same time window.

Waterloo, Canada.

Over at the Kaplan team, after finally finishing Layer-7, although the path ahead was long, there were no more dangerous shoals.

The self-similar structure of the substitution system acted like a cold, precise machine, forcing all higher-level boundaries into that sole aperiodic orbit.

Not a single state could escape the cage that Jiang Lin had welded shut using local rules and hierarchical substitution structures.

A brief email was sent from Waterloo to that secretive inner circle.

Verification complete up to Layer-12. No further obstructions found. The substitution structure is rigid all the way up.

Thus, scattered across the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, and Japan, almost all core researchers worldwide who were genuinely interested and capable of tackling this tile used three or more independent computational systems, approaching from three different directions, to repeatedly verify the exact same conclusion.

It was correct.

It really was correct.

...

Afternoon, London time.

Marcus Holt sat in his book-cluttered office at the University of Warwick.

Spread out before him was the paper he had painstakingly analyzed word by word with a stylus over this period.

"A Construction and Proof of an Aperiodic Monotile Forced by Local Boundaries"

Every margin was filled with his annotations, question marks, and derivation sketches.

And now, those question marks had been checked off one by one with a red pen.

The last question mark was on the core lemma in Section 3 regarding skeleton recognition.

That had been the part he felt most uncertain about.

Holt had spent a week deriving it three times on scratch paper himself.

Ensuring that every derivation aligned seamlessly with Jiang Lin's conclusion.

He opened his Twitter account, which had over twenty thousand academic followers.

A few days ago, he had posted an update here saying that Tile J deserved serious attention and that its substitution rules were computationally robust.

Unbeknownst to him, that post had become a starting gun for his peers, prompting them to begin critically scrutinizing it.

And now.

Holt paused in silence for a few seconds before typing a brand-new message.

This time, he used no hedged or tentative language.

"I have read through the entire main proof of Tile J line by line and completed an independent review. Computational verifications from multiple independent teams, including those in Waterloo and Berlin, using mutually unrelated code implementations, yield completely identical results."

"In my view, this proof is complete and correct."

"The aperiodic monotile problem—the question of whether there exists a single shape that can tile the entire plane without any such tiling having translational periodicity—has been solved by an irrefutable construction for the first time, more than half a century after it was posed."

"I pay my deepest respects to this author."

He paused, seemingly recalling that absurdly surreal author affiliation.

Finally, he added one more sentence.

"No matter where he comes from, no matter how old he is."

Sent.

This tweet did not contain a single exclamation mark.

But for the more than one hundred researchers around the world who had staked their careers on this niche field, its weight was heavier than a thousand tons.

Because the person who uttered this was one of the most cautious, old-school scholars in the field, someone who rarely endorsed anything easily.

He used the word "correct" and stated it was "completely solved."

This meant that the collective review within the community, forged from code and scratch paper, had finally come to a close.

———

Over the next few hours, echoes of support cascaded like a roaring tsunami.

An old geometer from CNRS in France posted his hand-calculated periodic band exclusion verification on the forum, with a caption consisting of just one word: Confirmed.

Over in Arkansas, that old fox who specialized in picking apart topological illusions in hierarchical substitution structures publicly admitted he couldn't find a single flaw, calling it an unsettlingly perfect work polished repeatedly by time.

The team from the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University uploaded their independent verification report on chiral reflection cases to the internet.

The hardcore "Tiling & Tessellation" forum, once filled with sarcasm and cynicism, underwent a dramatic shift in tone.

Seven days ago, the pinned post's title was still "Another Einstein claim?"

(Another amateur claiming to have solved it?).

Now, the moderator re-pinned the post and updated the title.

The Einstein problem is solved. (Tile J confirmed by multiple independent teams)

In the thread, the top-upvoted reply came from an old veteran account that had studied tiling for over twenty years.

He wrote:

"I've studied this field for half my life, thinking that in my lifetime, I probably wouldn't see the day it was ultimately solved."

"Now the answer is here, and it didn't even come from any name I recognize in our circle."

"Mathematics is sometimes cruel and romantic like that."

"It doesn't care who you are."

"It only cares if your tile is correct."

———

Once the machine of academia reaches a consensus, downstream propagation occurs faster than imagined.

The first to react were still those popular science media outlets that had long been monitoring arXiv.

The magazine that had blown up the internet seven days ago with "A Tile That Never Repeats" updated with a brand-new report within almost two hours of Holt's tweet.

Back then, their title cautiously contained a "might."

"A Tile That Never Repeats: A Problem That Has Troubled Humanity for Sixty Years Might Be Solved"

And now.

The new title was decisive and unequivocal.

"The Sixty-Year Wait Is Over: The Aperiodic Monotile Problem That Troubled Humanity Has Been Completely Terminated by a Tile Named Tile J"

The article concluded with a sentence that gave countless ordinary readers goosebumps instantly.

"For decades, countless brilliant minds failed to forge a path through this swamp. But now, the path has been cleared. This bizarre, ugly, and jagged tile will stand as a milestone in human mathematical history, permanently etched into every textbook on tiling."

The word "milestone" was instantly picked up by serious media around the world.

[part:gemini-3.5-flash-lite]

Major newspapers that previously used cautious qualifiers like "if confirmed", "may rewrite", or "suspected breakthrough" in their headlines all removed every single qualifier.

The New York Times: A milestone moment in the history of human mathematics.

The Guardian: A single tile has ended a sixty-year-old geometric problem.

Domestically, the tech sections of The Paper and The Beijing News rewrote their articles almost overnight.

And what made everyone feel the most dizzy and absurd was still that single column of information—repeatedly confirmed countless times by the entire world, yet still unbelievable.

The person who accomplished all this.

Is not some tenured professor from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Not some lifelong immersed geometrician in Cambridge, Oxford, or the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

But rather a high school senior from an ordinary public secondary school in a tier-two Chinese city, who was just a few days away from taking the Gaokao.

— — —

The reversal of public opinion was violent.

And standing in the most awkward position of this violent trend was Shen Yanqiu.

At 6:23 PM four days ago, he staked his accumulated reputation of ten years and published that three-thousand-word article, "Don't Rush to Cheer Just Yet".

Using five logically rigorous arguments, he sentenced the probability of a high school student independently solving a century-old problem to death, concluding that there was greater than an eighty percent probability of irreparable logical gaps.

He even swore at the end of the article that if this preprint was ultimately confirmed by the international discrete geometry community to be completely flawless, he would immediately and publicly bow and apologize to Jiang Lin across the entire internet, and suspend updates on all his accounts for three months to reflect behind closed doors.

How certain and condescending he was back then.

And now.

The confirmation from the international discrete geometry community had arrived.

It arrived much faster and far more thoroughly than he had imagined.

Not just one team, but virtually all teams.

Not partial verification, but independent reproduction from scratch, a complete clearance moving layer by layer up to Layer-12, and Marcus Holt's uncompromising declaration that it was complete and correct.

His five arguments were crushed into powder one by one.

[Teacher Shen, the international consensus has formed. Aren't you going to delete that article?]

[Suspend updates for three months, bow and apologize. Teacher Shen, a man must keep his word.]

[Seriously, I used to admire Teacher Shen quite a bit for exposing so many frauds. But this time, his car crash was way too thorough. The problem isn't that his judgment was wrong—anyone can make mistakes. The problem is that he was so confident in his wrongness, and so eager to sentence a high school student to death.]

[This must be the arrogance of empiricism. He used the experience accumulated from ten years of exposing frauds to deny a genius far beyond his experiential scope, and in the end, his experience betrayed him.]

...

Shen Yanqiu knew what the only thing he could do now, and his only decent choice, was.

After a long silence, he opened Weibo and Zhihu.

He still didn't delete "Don't Rush to Cheer Just Yet".

Deleting it would be a sign of a complete guilty conscience.

Beneath that long article, he pinned a new dynamic update.

"Regarding Tile J: The international discrete geometry community has confirmed the completeness and correctness of the proof. Multiple independent teams have completed reproduction using mutually unrelated code implementations. Previously, in the article 'Don't Rush to Cheer Just Yet', based on past experience, I judged the probability that a high school student could independently complete this work to have a greater than eighty percent chance of possessing irreparable logical gaps."

"This judgment was wrong, and absurdly wrong at that."

"I once said that if this paper was confirmed to hold true, I would publicly apologize and suspend updates for three months. The hardest thing for a person is not questioning others, but admitting one's own mistake after reality proves them wrong."

"Here, I solemnly apologize to classmate Jiang Lin."

"I underestimated him, and I underestimated the very possibilities of genius. I used the experience accumulated from my ten years of exposing frauds to measure someone who far exceeded my experience. This was my arrogance and prejudice."

"Starting today, all of my accounts will suspend updates for three months. During these three months, I will re-read that paper and see how an eighteen-year-old managed to reach this step."

"Truth does not need trending searches to be guaranteed entry, and science does not need believers to hold a carnival."

"I used this sentence in the past to remind others. Today, it should be used to remind myself."

At the very end of the post, he actually attached a photo.

It was a photo of him standing in his study, facing the camera, bowing deeply.

This time, Shen Yanqiu's admission of fault instead won back a portion of respect.

But more people, within his decent Waterloo, savored another layer of flavor that made one's scalp tingle even more.

[Even someone at Shen Yanqiu's level judged incorrectly. What does this indicate?]

[It shows that that high school senior is truly terrifying. Terrifying to the point that even a popular science influencer who has stepped away from the frontline but still knows his stuff is completely unable to understand him with common sense.]

— — —

And what truly pushed this monstrous wave to its absolute climax was Zhihu.

When the international consensus formed, the media narrative completely unified, and Shen Yanqiu publicly apologized.

A new question was voted up to the number one spot on Zhihu's trending list.

The title of the question was so simple it was almost naive, yet it precisely struck the core that tens of millions of people most wanted to know at this moment.

[How should we evaluate the aperiodic monotile problem independently solved by Jiang Lin? What level is this achievement in the mathematical world, exactly?]

The responses underneath rapidly surged from the initial few hundred to tens of thousands.

The one that rushed to first place earliest was a respondent verified as a PhD candidate in discrete mathematics.

"Let's state the conclusion first: this is not just a paper, but a milestone."

"Why?"

"Because there are tens of thousands of good papers every year, whereas a milestone might only appear once every few decades."

"The aperiodic monotile problem, commonly known as the Einstein problem (Einstein is a German pun for a piece of stone, unrelated to that physicist), ever since Wang tiles were proposed in the 1960s, has become a pearl on the crown of discrete geometry that hung suspended for over half a century without anyone being able to pluck it down."

"And what this classmate Jiang Lin did was a conclusive resolution. Pay attention to the two words 'conclusive resolution', because the aperiodic monotile problem is no longer an open problem; it has been closed."

"Given the scarcity of such achievements, if a mathematician can spend their entire life solving a world-class problem of this level, their life has already been worth it."

Beneath this response, someone followed up with a question.

[So can he win the fields medal?]

The respondent didn't go along with the revelry to hype it up, instead adding a very cautious paragraph.

"Don't rush to shout fields medal."

"The fields medal typically does not reward single achievements; it tends to reward continuous, programmatic work that opens up an entire field and influences a generation. Throughout history, those who won the fields medal relying on a single explosive point are extremely rare."

"Based solely on this single tile, it might not directly lock down the fields medal. Furthermore, the direction of combinatorial/discrete geometry has never been considered the most favored category in the historical taste of the fields medal."

"But please note, he is only eighteen years old this year. From eighteen until before forty, theoretically he can still go through many fields medal cycles. Tile J itself is already enough for the entire world to remember his name. Moving forward, as long as he continues to produce, he will be one of the most worth-watching young mathematicians of this era."

"As for others, the mathematical world has no Nobel Prize. The top awards are the Fields, Abel, and Wolf prizes. Abel and Wolf lean toward lifetime achievement and have nothing to do with young people. But various awards targeting young mathematicians, memberships in various societies, and olive branches from top universities around the world—these things, starting today, will fly toward him like snowflakes."

...

Ranked second among the high-voted responses was a respondent verified as a young faculty member at a certain 985 university.

His perspective was even more realistic, and even more piercing to the heart.

"As a young faculty member, I want to tell everyone from the most authentic perspective of our group just how absurd Jiang Lin writing Tile J really is."

"Let's first do a thought experiment. Suppose—and I mean suppose—this paper wasn't written by a high school senior, but by a young lecturer in his thirties at an ordinary non-Project 211/985 university, still worrying about getting a professional title, and rubbed into the ground every day by assessment metrics."

"What would happen?"

"I can responsibly tell you all that this lecturer would end all his career anxiety overnight."

"He would be directly promoted out-of-turn, skipping associate professor from lecturer to be appointed full professor directly. All universities would scramble to give him out-of-turn positions, scientific research startup funds, independent teams, and support for applying for national-level talent projects. In his lifetime, he wouldn't need to write a bunch of peripheral papers to meet assessment requirements anymore, wouldn't need to beg people for a horizontal project, and wouldn't need to prove at college meetings that he still had potential."

"Because he has already finished proving it."

"An ordinary lecturer, relying on just this single paper, could be pushed directly from the periphery of the academic system into the center of the spotlight."

"Now, please snap back to reality."

"The person who wrote this paper is not a lecturer."

"It is a high school senior who hasn't even set foot through the doors of a university yet."

"That kind of achievement which people like us—who read up to PhDs, did research for many years, and treat papers, titles, and projects as our lifelong rice bowls—dreamed of touching just once, was obtained ahead of time by a child still preparing for the Gaokao."

"Can you all feel that sense of absurdity?"

If the first response was placing Tile J back into the history of mathematics.

Then the second response was weighing Tile J inside the realistic academic system.

And what truly made ordinary readers begin to get tingling scalps was the third response.

The respondent was verified as a postdoctoral researcher in the direction of number theory.

Instead of explaining the monotile problem right off the bat, he mentioned a name that many Chinese readers were not unfamiliar with.

"I see many people using grassroots counterattack and sweeping monk to describe Jiang Lin's situation. Actually, in the history of mathematics, a real-life case truly close to the template of a single paper changing a life is Yitang Zhang."

"Mr. Yitang Zhang, born in 1955, the first half of his life can be summarized by the two words 'bumpy and difficult'. For a long time after graduating with his PhD, he couldn't find a faculty position, reportedly once working part-time at a chain fast-food restaurant helping manage accounts. Later, he spent many years as a lecturer at a university that wasn't exactly top-tier, the University of New Hampshire."

"A lecturer in the American academic system is a position with little say, one that can be marginalized at any time. He stayed obscurely in that position until his fifties. In the eyes of many people, his life was probably just going to be like that."

"Then, in 2013, at fifty-eight years old, he published a paper in the Annals of Mathematics—'Bounded Gaps Between Primes'. It proved that there exist infinitely many pairs of primes with a gap between them of less than seventy million."

"This was the most crucial step taken by humanity in decades upon the great mountain of the twin prime conjecture."

"This single paper made this unknown fifty-eight-year-old lecturer famous worldwide overnight. Top-tier awards poured in one after another—the Morningside Gold Medal of Mathematics, the Rolf Schock Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Ostrowski Prize... From a struggling lecturer, he was directly appointed as a full professor at the University of California, invited to give lectures all over the world, and became a legend."

"A single paper at fifty-eight years old changed his life, sending him straight from the bottom of the valley into the history of mathematics."

"Isn't this story inspiring and legendary enough?"

"Right now, please allow me to draw a comparison between Yitang Zhang's example and today's event."

"First, from the single dimension of whether it closed the original problem, the narrative of Tile J is much easier for ordinary people to understand as a definitive achievement. Meanwhile, Yitang Zhang's work pried open a decisive gap in a grander chain of conjectures. The two cannot be simply compared in terms of superiority, but both belong to rare cases where a single result alters academic coordinates."

"Second, and most breathtakingly, in terms of age."

"Yitang Zhang was fifty-eight years old when he produced the work that canonized him as a god, and all of us shed tears of emotion over his legend of late success."

"Jiang Lin is eighteen years old."

"He is a full forty years younger than Yitang Zhang was the year he achieved legendary status."

"Friends, I am not belittling Mr. Yitang Zhang; on the contrary, I am filled with the deepest respect for him. I simply want to use this comparison to let you truly feel—"

"what kind of event we are witnessing today."

"An eighteen-year-old youth has accomplished something comparable to the legendary stories in the history of mathematics that achieved instant apotheosis, and has even gone a step further in the two dimensions of definitiveness and age."

"I don't know how to describe this feeling."

"If geniuses truly have tiers, then today, we may have witnessed a monster that exceeds the upper limit of our generation's imagination."

The final sentence of this answer was screenshotted, reposted, printed on the covers of countless marketing accounts, and spread across the entire Chinese internet.

Just as everyone was still discussing how powerful this achievement really was, another more realistic question was quickly pushed to the top.

People began to ask a simple question.

［What kind of rewards can Jiang Lin actually receive?］

Beneath this question, the answer voted to the top left countless people stunned right from its very first sentence.

The respondent is verified as having worked in university admissions for many years.

His first sentence directly left many people dumbfounded.

"To speak a truth that might disappoint many people: the reward system of the entire high school stage can no longer hold an achievement of this magnitude."

"Let's trace things out: what is typically the highest-spec recognition a genius high school student can receive?"

"Tsinghua University and Peking University's recommendation qualifications, exceptional admission into the Qiangji Program, early admission to the Class for the Gifted Young, Shing-Tung Yau Mathematics Leadership Program, direct selection into various elite classes..."

"These are the green channels meticulously paved by our country for that tiny fraction of the most outstanding students."

"But please fix your eyes on four words—outstanding students."

"From the very first day these channels were designed, the objects they served were outstanding, promising students worthy of key cultivation. Their underlying logic is: You are very capable, so I will give you a better platform and cultivate you into someone who might produce major achievements in the future."

"Yet the problem is Tile J—it holds true."

"Jiang Lin is no longer someone who might produce major achievements in the future."

"He has already independently solved a century-old problem."

"Asking someone who has independently solved a century-old problem and is about to be written into relevant textbooks to go through the recommendation process and prove his cultivation value once more—"

"Don't you think this matter itself carries a sense of dark humor?"

"This is like someone successfully summiting Mount Everest alone, and upon returning, being asked if he wants to join a mountaineering club's youth training camp and learn how to tie safety ropes from scratch."

"There is nothing wrong with the youth training camp; what is misplaced is the target audience."

"Therefore, Jiang Lin's problem has never been whether he can be recommended to Tsinghua University and Peking University."

"Rather, it is a question that the School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University, Tsinghua University's Qiuzhen College and the Shing-Tung Yau Mathematics Leadership Program, the National Center for Theoretical Sciences, the Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research, and even the entire domestic mathematics community must answer."

"What kind of environment should we ultimately place this student into so that he won't be wasted?"

Beneath this answer, an addition by a current student at Qiuzhen College of Tsinghua University was voted very high.

The words were not long, yet they pierced like a needle into the soft underbelly of all so-called genius cultivation systems.

"I am right here in Qiuzhen College."

"The meaning of our project's existence is to select the most mathematically talented saplings in advance, bypassing routine exams through a joint bachelor-doctorate integrated path, and cultivate people according to the standards of future mathematicians."

"To put it simply, we are seeds."

"We are picked out, protected, irrigated, and expected to perhaps bear a world-class fruit one day in the future."

"But what about Jiang Lin?"

"Before even entering the garden, he grew the fruit all by himself out in the wilderness."

"Someone joked in our college group chat today that if Jiang Lin comes to the Qiuzhen Program, is the program going to cultivate him, or is he going to serve as a living signboard for the program?"

Amidst this heated discussion about what kind of environment he should be placed into, another voice carrying obvious anxiety also emerged.

People stopped asking only what rewards he could get.

Instead, they began to ask: where should he go?

"Don't just focus on arguing over Tsinghua University and Peking University or Qiuzhen College; haven't you realized a more urgent problem?"

"Saplings of this caliber—we are not the only ones who want him."

"The moment Tile J goes live, Princeton, Cambridge, École Normale Supérieure, and those top-tier mathematics centers won't be any slower than Tsinghua University and Peking University."

"The conditions they can offer are probably ones we wouldn't even dare to imagine: full scholarship, exemption from examinations, top-tier advisor groups, independent research funding, freedom to choose topics..."

"And what about our side? If we still hold onto the mindset of 'you come participate in a selection first, you go through the recommendation process according to procedure, we'll admit you exceptionally if you do well on the Gaokao,' taking things step-by-step leisurely—"

"I'm telling you the truth, in the end it might make him feel that this environment doesn't understand him at all."

"A Chinese youth who ended a century-old problem at eighteen—if in the end, he wears someone else's school badge and makes his subsequent greater achievements in someone else's research institute—"

"that would be the most agonizing outcome in this entire matter."

Beneath this view, someone immediately refuted it.

"Don't immediately jump to foreign countries snatching people. He hasn't even said a word himself, and you guys are already getting anxious for him?"

"The affiliation he wrote is Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, not some overseas institution. He hasn't even accepted media interviews up to now; by all accounts, he doesn't look like the type to rush abroad immediately."

But soon, someone else gave a calmer response.

"Precisely because he is so strong, we must even less approach him with the posture of snatching him up. For a talent like this, the more you try to box him in with treatment, bind him with honor, or pressure him with bringing glory to the country, the more likely it is to backfire."

"The greatest respect for him is perhaps not deciding where he should go on his behalf, but letting him choose for himself."

Above all this clamorous bickering over rewards, snatching talent, and going abroad, an answer whose upvote count wasn't the highest, yet was silently reposted by countless industry insiders, poured a bucket of cold water over everyone.

The respondent is verified as a professor of fundamental mathematics.

"I've looked at many answers below; everyone is arguing about what award he should receive, which school he should enter, and whether he will be poached abroad."

"As someone who has spent most of my life in this industry, I want to say something unappealing."

"Actually, none of these are the most important things."

"No matter how great Tile J is, it is merely an achievement. In the history of mathematics, there is no shortage of people who became famous young, made a startling debut, but thereafter found it hard to break through again and gradually faded into silence. Sometimes, the fall of a genius is even more lamentable than a genius never being born."

"Therefore, for Jiang Lin, what truly matters has never been what rewards should be given to him. Rewards are past tense—they are a retrospective validation of things that have already happened. They are the icing on the cake and cannot determine any future."

"What is truly important is the future."

"It is whether he can next enter an environment free enough to engage in equal dialogue with the top minds on this planet. It is whether, after being placed on a pedestal by the entire world, he can still quietly sit down and continue doing mathematics."

"Everyone who wants him should first ask themselves a question."

"Do we want to snatch him over to serve as our own gold-plated signboard?"

"Or do we want to give him a patch of soil that truly won't waste him?"

"The former is possession."

"The latter is fulfillment."

"I hope that what remains in the end is the latter."

"And I also hope this child is lucky enough."

Beneath this answer, a comment was voted to the very top.

It wasn't as professional as the long answers before it.

It even looked a bit like a casual sentiment written by a netizen.

Yet it was precisely this sentence that made countless people pause in front of their screens.

"The professor is right, but there is a problem."

"Does the environment you all speak of—does it truly exist?"

"For someone who drew a full stop at eighteen to a problem that had hung in suspension for sixty years, what kind of school, what kind of center, what kind of advisor in this world dares to say that they can teach him better?"

"We are all arguing about which best cage he should be placed into."

"But what if he doesn't belong to any cage at all?"

This comment ultimately garnered tens of thousands of upvotes.

In the comment section, everyone was marveling at the romance and loneliness of this sentence.

Not a single person knew.

how close this sentence, almost casually asked by a netizen, actually was to the truth that everyone was desperately pursuing.

——

And this genius referred to as a monster—

at this moment, was sitting in the classroom of Grade 3 Class 4 at Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

Sun Ming, sitting next to Jiang Lin, turned off the screen of his phone hidden inside a dictionary.

Just moments ago, he had read those highly-voted Zhihu answers from beginning to end over and over again.

For a long time, he turned his head with a sense of shared honor, and asked the person beside him in a pilgrimage-like breathy tone.

"Old Jiang, are you still taking the Gaokao?"

"Taking it."

"You're still taking it even after all this?"

"The admission tickets have already been distributed."