A Beautiful Path to Drag Them Along
Lead Author: Lee Cheol-jun (Dept. of Mathematics, Seohan University)
Corresponding Author: Kim Sang-wook (Dept. of Mathematics, Seohan University)
Although the title carried the dry, typical nuance of a traditional mathematics paper, the explosive power of the content it contained was anything but dry.
After all, it claimed to prove that the orbits of the Many-Body Problem, which had plagued modern astronomy for over a century, would remain stable forever without collapsing—all through an intuitive geometry that twisted phase space.
The first to react were young mathematicians and theoretical physicists around the world whose daily hobby was hunting for new papers the moment they brewed their morning coffee.
"What? Orbital stability of the many-body problem? What is this?"
"Seohan University in Korea? Lee Cheol-jun? Who is that?"
"Never heard of him. I looked up the corresponding author, Kim, and he seems to be an algebra professor. Some poor grad student desperate for publications must have made a reckless gamble."
The academics snorted.
The Many-Body Problem was a field that countless geniuses, including Henri Poincaré, had challenged and abandoned over the course of more than a century.
So when an unknown Korean researcher claimed to have overturned it with pure mathematics, it looked like nothing more than a third-rate hoax designed to draw attention.
Hundreds of such absurd papers were uploaded to arXiv every single day.
There were even two or three ridiculous papers uploaded every month claiming to have solved the Riemann Hypothesis or perfectly resolved the P=NP problem.
And tearing those papers to shreds to feel a sense of intellectual superiority was one of the minor pleasures of being an academic.
Of course, rather than the top-tier scholars, it was usually the young academics who had just entered the field who indulged in this kind of fun, and they vastly outnumbered the elite.
"Let's see just how poorly written this is, shall we?"
The young academics pulled up the PDF on their monitors and began dissecting the equations.
First of all, everyone shook their heads at the page count.
A typical paper on the Many-Body Problem was usually between thirty and sixty pages.
While papers containing numerical integration methods or simulation results grew longer due to graphs and data tables, the actual mathematical derivations weren't that long because they left the heavy lifting to computers.
However, because this paper was structured entirely differently, its length was staggering.
Huh? Two hundred and fifty pages?
A paper on the Many-Body Problem developed through pure mathematics without any numerical integration.
This absurdly massive paper had barely any graphs or data tables; it was filled entirely with equations.
What's more, the derivations were so kind and detailed that even an undergraduate could understand them, laid out step-by-step without skipping a single stage, as if teaching a student.
And the moment they reached the core proof of the paper, everyone burst into incredulous laughter.
"My god, they manually expanded the Von Zeipel generating function here? Are they insane?"
"If they used Poisson brackets, they could have wrapped this up in three lines. Why did they expand it step-by-step over dozens of pages? This is outdated grunt work only an undergraduate would do."
To mathematicians who prized sleek, elegant abbreviation, a path laid out so kindly that anyone could follow it seemed incredibly verbose and primitive.
The young academics were thrilled.
A long and complex derivation meant it would be that much easier to find a logical error and crush it.
Moreover, while the volume was immense, the steps themselves weren't overly difficult, and the corresponding author was completely unknown.
So there was no need to worry about stepping on any important toes.
Armed with the arrogance of wanting to tear this ridiculous paper to shreds, the scholars began dismantling the equations on scratch paper.
After all, the pleasure of crushing something was quite thrilling.
Especially a paper claiming to have solved, with a mere pen, the Many-Body Problem that humanity had long since delegated to computers.
Thus, the number of young academics craving a dopamine hit steadily grew.
Yet, the errors they expected to find so easily were nowhere to be seen.
As the pages turned, the stacks of scratch paper piled higher, and instead of the pleasure of intellectual superiority, massive, incomprehensible question marks began to occupy their minds.
Wait... Why on earth is this...?
And those question marks began to fly across the network, intertwining with one another.
Kim Sang-wook, Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Seohan University's College of Natural Sciences.
In his youth, he too had dreamed of becoming a great mathematician, covered in chalk dust.
He had imagined making a proof that would shock the world, standing proudly on the stage to receive the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics.
It was a passionate ambition that anyone who pursued pure science as a career harbored at least once.
But mathematics was a truly cruel discipline.
A world where the wall of innate genius, which could never be breached by effort alone, stood with absolute clarity.
During his studies abroad, Kim Sang-wook had witnessed real, monstrous geniuses and gradually realized his own limitations to his very bones.
The realization that his ordinary brain could never surpass them turned into a sense of shame that tormented him.
After that, he abandoned his adventures.
Rather than struggling for attention on the global stage, competing fiercely with monsters, he chose to find stability within the narrow but cozy well of South Korea.
He published papers in decent domestic and international journals, secured research grants, and smoothly secured the title of Chair of the Mathematics Department at Seohan University through tight academic networking and political maneuvering.
That alone allowed him to live a comfortable life and receive a fair amount of respect, making it a reasonably satisfying existence.
To spend the rest of his tenure without incident, retiring gracefully without ever standing at the center of any major controversy.
If things went well, serving as the Dean of the College of Natural Sciences would be the perfect grand finale.
That was Kim Sang-wook's realistic ultimate goal.
But then,
right into the middle of his peaceful, compromised life, a massive comet forged by an eleven-year-old boy had crashed.
Topological Resolution of the Small Denominator Problem in Perturbed Hamiltonian Systems and the Asymptotic Stability of N-Body Orbits
To think that he was the corresponding author of this monumental paper shaking the global mathematics community...
His name was plastered right there in that glorious yet cursed position.
When he first accepted Edward Kang's proposal to act as a shield, he had been somewhat excited.
The fact that his name would occupy a spot in a historic moment that would shake the global academic community had slightly tickled the intellectual vanity of his youth, which he had buried deep in his heart.
After all, if the true author was revealed to be Cheol-jun later on, he would be praised as a wonderful mentor and supporter who had discovered this great genius and acted as his shield.
But he had vastly underestimated the ripple effect of the mainstream global academic community.
Less than a day after the paper was uploaded to arXiv, the official email account of Seohan University's mathematics department was flooded with tens of thousands of emails from all over the world.
A waterfall of insults, praises, and fierce questions about the equations poured in, written in English, French, and German.
On communities like MathOverflow, PubPeer, and Reddit, more than half of every page was filled with talk about the paper.
The domestic situation was even more horrific.
"Professor Kim! What is this? Who on earth is Lee Cheol-jun?!"
"Hyung-nim, what is going on? You didn't make a reckless move just to secure a national research grant, did you?"
"Hey, if you had something like this, you should have shared! Keeping it all to yourself..."
"But did you write out the equations so verbosely on purpose?"
"Let me ask you just one thing. In the section on removing the small denominators..."
Phone calls began pouring in from mathematics professors at domestic universities with whom he usually exchanged casual greetings.
Every single one of them interrogated Kim Sang-wook with voices laced with a mixture of shock and suspicion.
He couldn't just come clean and tell the truth, nor could he shamelessly lie—since he hadn't directly touched the proof himself.
His heart raced relentlessly, and his stomach knotted tightly from extreme stress.
The scale of this global attention was far too massive and destructive for a cowardly mathematician who had spent his entire life seeking stability and reading the room to handle.
Bzzzzzz.
Kim Sang-wook flinched.
Now, his heart dropped at the mere vibration of his phone.
Kim Sang-wook rubbed his face with trembling hands and let out a deep groan.
In the end, he was left with no choice but to turn off his phone entirely.
"Sigh..."
He shook his head vigorously, and a shower of hair fell.
Huh?
The amount of fallen hair on his desk was highly alarming.
Kim Sang-wook squeezed his eyes shut.
"Is that so? The paper was uploaded to arXiv?"
"Yes!"
Go Chang-ho smiled warmly, feeling incredibly proud, but he was secretly worried.
He had published a few papers in the field of education himself.
So he knew all too well that the moment a paper was published, it wasn't congratulations that awaited, but the merciless dissection and nitpicking of countless scholars.
It was the so-called culture of peer review.
Academia was by no means a gentle or elegant place.
Furthermore, the harshness of the mathematics community was on an entirely different level compared to the field of education.
Go Chang-ho only knew the basics, but the mathematics community was far more brutal and cutthroat than other disciplines.
According to his friends in pure mathematics, the atmosphere there when looking at someone else's paper was less about trying to understand it and more about finding a counterexample to destroy it.
They also suffered from severe elitism and territoriality.
Because mathematics was a discipline where one competed solely with pure brainpower, the scholars' pride was higher and their intellectual arrogance stronger than in any other field.
Go Chang-ho had heard some explanations about this paper and understood it to some extent.
He had even looked into it separately, wanting to know just how incredible of a feat Cheol-jun had accomplished.
Through his research, he learned that the Many-Body Problem and the KAM Theorem were considered extremely difficult, even if they weren't classified as unsolved riddles in the traditional mathematics community.
To the mainstream academic community, full of intellectual vanity and arrogance, this claim might even be perceived as an insult, meaning they might try even harder to tear it down.
Even as a fully grown adult, he had tossed and turned for nights over just a few thorny comments from his peers...
Can this young child handle the jealousy of these cold, brutal adults without getting hurt?
Go Chang-ho stared quietly at Cheol-jun, who was smiling brightly.
"So, is it... fun?"
"Yes!"
"What part of it?"
"At first, it was fun just seeing a path only visible to my eyes. Then, making that path together with the other teachers was incredibly fun too! And this time, I discovered a whole new kind of fun!"
"Really? What kind of fun?"
Cheol-jun grinned.
But somehow, the feeling was different from the mischievous smiles Go Chang-ho had seen from him before.
"Making the people who insult the path my teachers and I built completely speechless."
"...Huh?"
"I realized how fun it was when I talked to Teacher Kang Man-sik back then!"
Go Chang-ho blinked.
He had heard about the police station incident back then.
He only knew that some sort of debate had taken place.
"Back then, Teacher Kang Man-sik called the path messy and ignorant! But when I explained everything to him step-by-step, he just collapsed into his seat!"
"...What?"
"It felt so good to win back then!"
"..."
"There will definitely be people who can't look at this path favorably. But I think it'll be really fun to convince even those people and make them follow my path whether they like it or not!"
Go Chang-ho swallowed hard.
He felt a sort of combative spirit radiating from Cheol-jun's face as he spoke.
It was unmistakable.
It was a completely different kind of smile, one he had never seen before.
The corners of Cheol-jun's mouth curled up even further.
"I'm going to drag the people who try to find faults without even walking the path properly all the way onto my path! Because once they step onto it, they'll realize it's so beautiful they won't have any choice but to keep walking!"
"Ah..."
Though softened by a child's vocabulary, his momentum was like that of a gladiator stepping confidently into the arena.
Only then did Go Chang-ho realize once again that Cheol-jun was not just an eleven-year-old child with an incredibly high IQ.
Cheol-jun wasn't just fast at exploring knowledge and understanding the world.
The intellectual combativeness he displayed while defending the universe he created and convincing—perhaps forcing—others to accept it had evolved in an instant after meeting world-class mathematicians.
He had worried the boy might get hurt, but instead, this child was enjoying himself, preparing to drag the world's greatest scholars who would attack him right into the world he had built.
He seemed to view the brutal verification process of the mathematics community as if it were a boss battle in the next stage of a game.
Then again, Edward Kang wouldn't have sent Cheol-jun out into the world without any preparation or safeguards.
Go Chang-ho shook his head.
He had satisfying premonition that a massive storm was about to sweep through the mathematics community.
Go Chang-ho smiled warmly.
"Right. You're absolutely correct, Cheol-jun. Since you built such a wonderful path, we should grab those stubborn old men by the collars, drag them over, and make them look at it."
"Yes! It's an incredibly beautiful path, so I'm sure everyone will love it!"
Cheol-jun grinned, returning to his usual bright, elementary school self.
"Oh! Here is Teacher Kang Man-sik's signature!"
"Oh! Thank you!"
"Hehe."
"Have a wonderful summer vacation!"
"Yes, Teacher!"
Thus began the first summer vacation Cheol-jun experienced since arriving in South Korea.