99: Chapter 99 The First Breakthrough

The first to catch this fire were not the mathematics journals with their lengthy review cycles, but popular science media.

Inside an office building in Manhattan, New York, the editorial team of Quanta Magazine already had two senior editors with PhDs in mathematics who constantly monitored combinatorics and geometric topology on arXiv.

In this highly specialized age, many groundbreaking mathematical achievements make their initial appearance not under the spotlight, but quietly on that plain-text update feed.

They saw Marcus Holt's extremely restrained yet clearly directed post, and subsequently followed the trail to see more and more tiling scholars from Canada, France, Japan, and other countries agreeing and reposting below it.

The Computational Geometry Lab at the University of Waterloo even publicly admitted that they had used computers to reconstruct the first four layers of hyper-blocks, proving the self-consistency of its local substitution rules under complexity constraints without any topological overlap.

Keen media professionals, like hyenas smelling blood, immediately caught the scent of the immense news value hidden behind this dry academic jargon.

Journalists quickly reached out via email and phone across half the globe to several discrete geometry scholars willing to make cautious statements.

Although facing the media's microphones, everyone spoke with the characteristic, almost obsessive restraint and rigor of academic circles.

Yet once placed into a beautifully formatted popular science article, it was more than enough to ignite the entire internet.

Because the editors of this media outlet knew exactly how to explain an extremely niche mathematical event—so esoteric that it required group theory and topology—to ordinary people who had long forgotten even their elementary math.

They used just a single sentence, an extremely everyday metaphor, as the title of the entire article.

"A Tile That Never Repeats: A Problem That Has Haunted Humanity for Sixty Years May Have Been Solved"

The opening of the article was almost brutally direct, yet it instantly captured everyone's attention.

In the center of the article was a high-resolution vector image of Tile J taken straight from The Paper.

An ordinary person might not understand any of the formulas about state flips in The Paper, but they could understand this picture, as well as the spatial imagery behind the phrase "a tile that covers the ground without ever repeating."

They could even construct an extremely concrete image in their mind.

Holding this strangely shaped tile with jagged edges, laying it on the ground, turning it left, flipping it right—no matter how it was placed, no regular pattern emerged, yet it somehow filled every single gap.

That was enough.

Accessible, visually evocative, and packed with dramatic tension that defied common sense.

Plus, an epic suspense that had baffled humanity for sixty years.

It possessed all the conditions required to instantly ignite a story, taking it from the cold, aloof world of academia straight onto the phone screens of millions of ordinary people.

What happened next was like the flapping of a butterfly's wings in the Amazon rainforest, eventually swelling into a hurricane that swept across the global internet.

Within just a few hours, that initial article was translated into dozens of languages by translation software and tech bloggers alike.

On Reddit's r/math subreddit, on Hacker News, on Twitter, and across major tech forums, discussion threads surged at a rate of over a hundred posts per minute.

The image of the tridecagon began to go viral across the entire internet.

It had neither the elegance of the golden ratio nor the symmetry of regular polygons.

Yet it was precisely this ugliness—this oddity constrained by extremely rigorous mathematical rules, this strange appearance that looked extraordinary at first glance—that gave it viral shareability.

Lopsided and crooked, looking like a roughly flattened wizard's hat or a crab with a broken leg, it was unforgettable after a single glance.

In a very short time, highly hands-on netizens began getting involved.

Someone quickly wrote an animated GIF script in Python based on the coordinates in The Paper, demonstrating how this tile wildly grew outward ring by ring in a non-periodic manner, like some non-carbon-based lifeform.

Others immediately created 3D models, batch-printed them using 3D printers, shot short videos, and snapped them together on desks, triggering a new wave of visual wonder.

Traditional serious media outlets began follow-up reporting, with tech sections of The New York Times, The Guardian, and domestic outlets like The Paper and Beijing News publishing articles one after another.

Their wording still maintained journalistic standards, cautiously including phrases like "if confirmed," "may rewrite geometry," or "reportedly solved" in their headlines.

However, downstream from serious media were content farms, independent media, and short video bloggers who had long smelled the traffic and swarmed in.

They didn't need restraint, nor did they even need to understand math.

All they needed was emotional sensationalism.

On the Chinese internet, bolded, red-highlighted headlines with exclamation points fluttered like snowflakes.

[Stunning Breakthrough! A World-Class Mathematical Problem That Haunted Humanity for Sixty Years Has Been Solved by a Chinese Person!]

[A Sixty-Year Mystery Solved Overnight! This Tile from China Is Shocking the Global Mathematics Community!]

[A Historic Moment! Foreign Experts Struck Silent as a Genius Emerges Out of Nowhere!]

...

Then, as the frenzy reached its climax, everyone's gaze naturally fell upon the header of the tsunami-inducing paper—specifically, the author and affiliation section.

Jiang Lin.

Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, China.

Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

An ordinary public high school located in a second-tier Chinese city.

This simple line of English characters was like a depth charge, causing a far more intense sense of dizziness and confusion than the strange tile itself.

Because according to the public's simple common sense, anyone who could solve a problem that had stumped humanity for sixty years—a problem that even countless top math professors from Princeton and Cambridge were helpless against—should at least have a prominent title behind their name, like "Institute for Advanced Study" or "School of Mathematical Sciences at University X."

How could it—and how should it—be affiliated with a high school?

Yet after the initial astonishment, everyone—whether skeptical scholars abroad or enthusiastic netizens at home—arrived at the exact same logical inference almost simultaneously.

An inference so logically natural that it barely required any cognitive processing.

This must be a high school teacher.

A key high school math teacher hiding in plain sight—a reclusive, hidden master like a "sweeping monk."

This inference was so reasonable that the moment it was born, it transcended national borders and cultural differences to become the default consensus across the entire internet.

It fit humanity's subconscious romantic prototype of a hidden genius all too perfectly.

An unrecognized master among the common folk, a humble monk content with poverty, day in and day out burying himself at the podium amidst chalk dust, who, in the long unknown nights alone in a modest lesson-prep room, used up stack after stack of scratch paper to finally crack a century-old problem that even professors at world-renowned universities couldn't solve.

This story template was simply too perfect, too touching.

...

Computational Geometry Lab, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Craig Kaplan sat in front of a multi-monitor workstation, his sunken eyes bloodshot.

He wanted to contact the author of The Paper.

This was an extremely natural and essential step in any serious verification process.

He had just gotten stuck while trying to reproduce the core boundary repulsion homeomorphism in Section 4 of The Paper, and desperately wanted to get the complete supplementary code used to verify the local state table.

First, he typed "Jiangcheng No. 7 High School" into a search engine.

The search results pointed to an ordinary public senior high school in Jiangcheng, China.

The official website's UI design was very plain, even a bit outdated, displaying red banners with yellow text announcing college entrance results, news about campus fire drills, and a sub-page showcasing featured teachers.

Using a web translation plugin, Kaplan clicked on the teacher profiles and browsed through the mathematics faculty list one by one.

Senior Teacher, First-Class Teacher, Subject Leader...

He scrolled from top to bottom, and then from bottom to top.

Not a single person's name pinyin was Jiang Lin.

Nor did any teacher's academic background mention even a single research direction related to discrete geometry, aperiodic tiling, graph theory, or anything intersecting with this profound paper.

Their profiles all read: "Years of experience guiding Grade 3 students, awarded Municipal Outstanding Homeroom Teacher, mentored students to win second prize in the Provincial High School Mathematics Competition."

Kaplan frowned and rubbed the space between his eyebrows in annoyance.

Could it be an adjunct part-time researcher?

Or a new teacher who just joined and hadn't been updated on the official website yet?

He reached out through several private academic channels.

Through a colleague teaching at a top university in China, he indirectly sent an extremely formal inquiry email to that high school, politely and cautiously worded: "Dear School Administration, does your school have a teacher engaged in pure mathematics research named Jiang Lin? Our laboratory would like to get in touch with him to discuss academic details regarding his recent preprint on an Einstein tile published on arXiv."

Almost at the exact same moment, the fastest media journalists in China also thought of this most direct step.

Some journalists placed calls directly to the principal's office and the academic affairs office of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

"Hello! This is XX Youth Daily. We would like to interview the teacher at your school who recently published that paper causing a sensation in the world of mathematics. May we have their contact information?"

The staff member in the school office holding a teacup on the other end of the phone was completely bewildered.

"Ah, what paper? Which teacher? Did you dial the wrong number? This is Jiangcheng No. 7 High School—the high school."

The reporter panicked: "No, we didn't call the wrong number! It's the one who solved the world mathematical problem. The author's affiliation is your school, named Jiang Lin. It's going crazy across the entire internet right now!"

The staff member paused for a few seconds, quickly running through the names of all two-hundred-plus faculty members in their mind, before replying in a very firm tone.

"Comrade, you've definitely made a mistake. At our school, whether teaching math or PE, we don't have any teacher named Jiang Lin at all—not even anyone with a homophonous name."

No such person existed.

Whether it was academic inquiries forwarded from top foreign scholars or phone calls from dozens of domestic media outlets to the school office, academic affairs, or even the security post, they all received the exact same unequivocal answer.

Jiangcheng No. 7 High School has no teacher named Jiang Lin.

Nor was there any teacher doing research on tiling, working on discrete geometry, or publishing a paper that read like gibberish on some all-English foreign website.

At once, the initial surprise and admiration instantly turned into even greater confusion, escalating into what felt like a suspense movie.

If the author was not a teacher at this school at all, then what was going on with the institutional suffix of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School?

Had some amateur math enthusiast randomly searched for a school name online to falsely claim an affiliation just to publish The Paper?

Or had some big shot at a university intentionally borrowed a shell identity for some ulterior motive?

Or was it a flex of a prank by a hacker?

[part:gemini-3.5-flash-lite]

Or could it be that this paper, which had triggered a global academic earthquake, was itself a meticulously designed hoax of the century from start to finish?

Doubts of whether it was genius or hype, fueled by this bizarre identity mystery, emerged on a massive scale within the public opinion arena like a backlash for the first time.

[Bizarre! The high school teacher acting as a hidden master who conquered a world-class problem turns out to be a ghost at the school?]

[Is it a true deity descended or a shocking hoax? Who on earth is the mysterious author Jiang Lin?]

[In-depth exposure: Paper institution fabrication, what kind of interest chain is really hidden behind this aperiodic tile?]

The mystery snowballed larger and larger.

A person who used extremely rigorous topological logic to supposedly solve a world-class problem hung the sign of a middle school whose very name exuded ordinariness, yet happened not to be any faculty member of this school.

At this moment, mathematicians, media personnel, and onlookers all over the world stopped what they were doing and uttered doubts akin to questioning the heavens in front of their screens.

Who on earth is Jiang Lin?

Until someone said that the mysterious author Jiang Lin was a senior high school student at Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

His name was Jiang Lin.

...

In the evening, there were about ten minutes left until the last class of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School.

At the school gate of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, the first person to sense that something was amiss was Lao Xu in the security guard room.

He had worked at No. 7 High School for twenty-two years, having seen parents delivering soup before the Gaokao, parents from other schools lining up during the high school entrance examination consultation season, and the city television station coming to film a special feature on the one-hundred-day countdown to the Gaokao.

But he had never seen this kind of commotion.

The first to arrive were several unmarked private cars and commercial vans.

They slowly stopped along the path at the school gate that was usually only crowded with electric bikes and private cars picking up kids.

The car doors opened, and cameramen carrying telephoto cameras and on-camera reporters holding microphones filed out, skillfully setting up camera positions and testing lines.

Shortly after, the second car, the third car...

In just a few short minutes, the unassuming school gate of No. 7 High School was unexpectedly crowded with twenty or thirty people carrying various equipment.

Among the crowd, a young man with a backpack and a fill light hanging around his neck was the most excited.

Holding a mobile phone mounted on a stabilizer, he faced the lens and began his live broadcast voiceover with spittle flying everywhere.

"Folks, folks, do you see this? I am currently right outside the gate of Jiangcheng No. 7 High School."

"According to confirmation from multiple sources, that mysterious author Jiang Lin who submitted the aperiodic single-tile paper on arXiv and supposedly solved a world-class problem that has plagued humanity for sixty years is from this school."

"No matter what, today we must block him for you folks and bring you folks first-hand exclusive footage."

He spoke with intense passion facing the camera, as if in the next second, a historically momentous figure would walk out from behind that closed iron gate.

But the problem was that he hadn't even truly seen what Jiang Lin looked like.

All he had saved in his mobile phone album was that high school freshman military training group photo circulating wildly across the internet, blurry like surveillance footage, showing a tall, thin figure circled by a red arrow in the back corner.

Lao Xu stood at the entrance of the guard room holding his thermos cup, looking blankly through the iron bars at the gathering array of long lenses and microphones outside.

What brick?

What sixty years?

Aren't the high school seniors inside doing test papers?

He turned his head to glance at the school sign, his first reaction being whether the school had been smeared by some marketing account with rumors.

The parents who arrived successively to pick up their children were even more dumbfounded by this commotion.

"Did something happen at No. 7 High School?"

"No way, I haven't heard anything."

A parent riding an electric bike parked the car by the side of the road, poked their head out, and asked the security guard, "Master, are there any activities at the school today?"

Lao Xu was even more bewildered than him: "No, normal dismissal."

After he finished speaking, his own heart began to feel uncertain.

Seeing the commotion growing larger and larger, the electric bike parent frowned.

Instead of continuing to ask the security guard, he took out his phone and sent a message to his child's head teacher.

Meanwhile, the various large and small media outlets blockading the school gate aimed their lenses at the school sign, the guard room, and every teacher passing through the school gate.

[Direct Hit at Jiangcheng No. 7 High School! A Suspected World-Class Mathematics Genius High School Student Is About to Appear!]

[An Eighteen-Year-Old Boy Shakes the Global Mathematics Community with a Single Tile, Will He Respond in Person?]

[With Only One Month Left Until the Gaokao, He Has Already Written Himself Into the History of Mathematics!]

...

The dismissal bell rang right on time.

The next moment, the students who had been suppressed all afternoon poured out in groups of three or five with their schoolbags on their backs, like a breached flood.

Inside the strictly managed teaching building, the director of student affairs repeatedly commanded that mobile phones were not allowed into the classroom. Even if a few people successfully smuggled them in and sneaked a peek at the trending searches, they merely thought it was some marketing account latching onto Jiangcheng No. 7 High School's name, and didn't have time to spread the news.

The storm of the world mathematics community had not truly penetrated those grey-white teaching buildings yet.

Those twenty or thirty media personnel at the school gate instantly tensed their nerves.

Their lenses were all uniformly aimed at the surging crowd of people.

However, among hundreds of green, youthful faces wearing identical school uniforms, no one could recognize which one was Jiang Lin, the person who had stirred up the global mathematics community.

That young voiceover guy holding the phone was sweating profusely with anxiety.

With one hand holding the stabilizer to scan the crowd, he fished his phone out of his pants pocket with the other hand, frantically comparing it to the military training photo blurred into a mosaic in his album.

...

When the first batch of students walked to the school gate and saw the row of cameras and live broadcast poles outside, almost everyone was stunned for a moment.

"What's the situation?"

"Filming a Gaokao documentary?"

Students who liked to join in the fun slowed down their pace wanting to watch the spectacle, but were waved away by security guard Lao Xu urging: "Don't stop, keep moving forward, don't block the door."

Just at this moment, behind the crowd, Jiang Lin, who happened to report back to school today, walked out following the procession of Grade 3 Class 4.

During the last self-study class just now, he had sorted out mechanical models for a few classmates with weak foundations in the class, breaking down the critical friction angle of the inclined plane and the rope-rod constraints into three pages of diagrams.

At this moment, his thoughts were still immersed in whether he should change the phrase about determining the direction of the support force prior to formula equations to be more straightforward.

He hadn't noticed the commotion at the school gate at all.

Until someone in the crowd suddenly shouted out.

"Holy shit!"

That voice was very sharp, carrying the uncontrollable shock of a young man.

"Isn't that Jiang Lin right there?"

The voice was loud, and the next second, all lenses turned simultaneously.

The young voiceover guy holding the phone reacted first.

He whipped his head around, his gaze switching back and forth between Jiang Lin's face and the blurry high school freshman military training group photo on his phone.

His entire body was as if struck by an electric current, his voice instantly pitching higher.

"Found him, folks, the suspected person himself has appeared."

The next second, Jiang Lin was solidly surrounded right in the center.

Dark, oppressive lenses were shoved right in front of his face, glaring fill lights made it somewhat hard for him to keep his eyes open, and seven or eight microphones were thrust over from all directions, almost poking his chin.

Chattering questions instantly surged from all directions like a tidal wave.

"Classmate Jiang Lin, may I ask if that paper was really written by you?"

"Did you really solve a world-class mathematical problem that has plagued the world for sixty years?"

"How are you feeling right now?"

"Why did you write your affiliation as Jiangcheng No. 7 High School?"

"Some people question that a high school student could not independently complete a paper of this level, how do you respond?"

"Have you already been admitted early by Peking University and Tsinghua University?"

"Do your parents know about this matter?"

"Will you participate in this year's Gaokao?"

"Will you win the fields medal next year?"

...

Jiang Lin, surrounded right in the center of the storm, looked at the lenses close at hand.

In an instant, he understood what had happened.

The Paper had gone mainstream.

A reporter shoved a phone almost into his mouth.

"Classmate Jiang Lin, can you give a direct response on whether you are the author of that single-tile paper?"

Jiang Lin glanced at him and said, "Please make way."

The reporter was stunned for a moment, but showed no intention of stepping aside at all: "Is it inconvenient for you to respond, or has the school already requested you to..."

"Please step aside." Jiang Lin interrupted him, "You are now affecting the school's normal dismissal order."

The surroundings fell briefly silent for an instant.

Probably no one expected that an eighteen-year-old high school student who had just been pursued by the entire internet, when blocked at the school gate by a dozen lenses, would have his first sentence spoken not be an explanation, not excitement, but a demand for them to make way.

That self-media blogger immediately seized the opportunity to shove the phone even closer.

"So you didn't deny that you are Jiang Lin, right? Can you say a word to the netizens in the live broadcast room?"

Jiang Lin finally turned his head to look at him.

Then his gaze calmly swept across those flushed, excited faces.

"The Paper is still undergoing peer review. Before the review concludes, I will not make any conclusive statements."

This sentence was like a basin of cold water poured into a boiling wok of oil.

Those who understood heard the boundary.

Those who didn't understand only heard four words.

No denial!

The bullet comments exploded instantly.

And the crowd at the scene completely lost control at this moment.

"He admitted it!"

"He is the person himself!"

"Classmate Jiang Lin, say a few more words!"

"May I ask how you did it?"

"Were you a genius since childhood?"

"What do you think of netizens saying you are the future of Chinese mathematics?"

The microphones continued to push forward.

A student was pushed so hard that he staggered a step.

Jiang Lin took half a step forward, reached out to steady the classmate who almost fell, and then looked up at the few lenses closest to him.

"This is the school gate, not your live broadcast room. Furthermore, your questions are not worth asking at the risk of a stampede."

After finishing these words, seeing that the media had no intention of retreating at all,

he knew that if he didn't say a bit more to guide the media's emotions this time, it could easily cause a stampede accident.

Making a decisive judgment, he pointed at the crowd and said.

"If you guys crowd forward like this again, I will refuse all interviews."

When these words fell, a true pause finally appeared around him.

But the next second, more mobile phones were raised.

However, right at this moment, teachers arrived from inside the campus, among them being head teacher Lao Liu, who was running with sweat all over his head, and the director of student affairs.

A quiet gap was temporarily pulled open on the inner side of the school gate.

Lao Liu, who already knew the ins and outs of the matter, panted and turned his head to look at Jiang Lin.

He originally wanted to say, such a big matter, why didn't you say anything earlier, but the words reached his lips and were forcefully swallowed back down.

Because this matter was probably something even Jiang Lin himself couldn't control in advance.

A high school senior wrote a paper.

And then the whole world chased after him to the school gate.

This was no longer a situation that a head teacher could handle with experience.

Right at this moment, movement came from the phone in Lao Liu's hand.

Incoming call display, Professor Gu Nanzhou.

After the call was connected, Professor Gu Nanzhou exchanged no pleasantries.

"Is Jiang Lin next to you?"

"Yes."

Jiang Lin took the phone over.

"Waterloo has reproduced up to the seventh layer. They sent an eight-page counterexample attempt, suspecting that a non-covered case exists in the boundary forcing of Layer 7."

"Send it to me."

"Are you free to look at it now?"

"Convenient. What they are blocking is the school gate, not the proof."