Yoo A-yeon, the Mathematician Who Proved the Riemann Hypothesis
Seeing that the informal verification process was wrapping up, I began to think about the next step.
And that was none other than submitting it to an official journal!
"To do that, I need to polish the paper more!"
"Isn't it already a perfect paper by your standards, A-yeon?"
My mom asked as I clenched my fists, burning with determination.
"Of course, by my standards, it's already perfect, but..."
I had realized something while replying to the flood of questions that poured into my inbox after the lecture.
The parts I had taken for granted and glossed over were not so obvious to the readers.
The logical progression wasn't wrong; the explanations were just unfriendly.
"Hmph, I wrote 125 pages trying to be nice and detailed..."
But what could I do?
No matter how smart you are, if you're trapped in your own little world, you can't be considered a great scholar.
A true scholar must explain things well enough for others to understand.
If I submitted it to a journal like this, the peer reviewers would inevitably get stuck on the exact same parts.
"I need to rewrite it to be reader-friendly. So Mom, help me type!"
"Alright. If my A-yeon wants to, as your mother, I'll do my best to help."
Mom said, taking off her apron.
This time, there was no need to rush like when I was answering the email inquiries.
We only worked for a set amount of time each day and rested for the remainder.
Mom also helped with the typing during A-rin's nap times.
Because of this, she was able to balance housework with editing the paper.
First, I grouped the most common questions from the emails.
Then, I added detailed explanations to the corresponding sections.
Why I chose this specific direction.
Why other directions wouldn't work.
Why this condition served as a sufficient condition.
The logical flow remained unchanged.
It was simply a matter of adding more meat to the bones.
"If I keep adding meat like this, it's going to get bloated... but since people like fat papers, I have no choice..."
Every time I polished the paper, I uploaded the revised version to arXiv.
A week later.
More questions came in.
I revised the paper again.
I revised it again.
I revised it again.
...
A-rin said as she looked at the file names I had edited.
"Hehehe! Unni is a dummy! A dummy!"
"Ugh... This is so frustrating..."
I was so vexed at having brought this dummy status upon myself that tears welled up, and I almost burst into a sob.
Mom also looked at the file names and said gently.
"...A-yeon, you're not going to submit it to the journal with those file names, right?"
"Of course I'll change the name before submitting. The ones uploaded to arXiv are just version names."
"Well, that's a relief."
Clack, clack, clack.
The work continued.
Collecting the questions received by email, revising again, reinforcing the explanations—the paper gradually became friendlier.
"Aaaagh! I can't do this anymore! This is really the end! The end! I'm not doing any more!"
No matter how tenacious I was.
Editing the exact same paper thirty-four times was enough to make me sick of it.
Declaring my surrender, I stood up and stretched my arms wide.
Mom was already exhausted, slumped face-down in front of the laptop.
"Finally... it's over..."
"Hehehe, you did great, Mom! I'll give you a pat!"
Pat, pat.
I gently stroked my exhausted mother's hair.
I decided to submit the completed paper to a top-tier journal immediately.
There was no reason to delay at this stage any longer.
Since the public lecture was over and the informal verification was complete.
Moving straight into the official peer-review process was the natural next step.
My target was, of course, a top-tier journal!
I planned to submit it to the international mathematics journal we subscribed to.
"It'll feel so good to see my paper published in a journal we subscribe to..."
Then, when I walk down the street, people will look at me and whisper, Oh my gosh, look over there! That's Yoo A-yeon, who published a paper in a top journal! She's so cool, so cute, so amazing! right?
Just imagining it made the corners of my mouth curl up into a grin.
"Anyway, therefore! I shall submit it to the journal right now!"
I submitted the final version of the paper, which had undergone thirty-four revisions.
The Major Mathematics Gallery.
This was a place that had already been paying close attention to Yoo A-yeon's paper.
But once the news spread that Yoo A-yeon had been active in this gallery under the registered handle "IQ_MegaGenius,"
she was treated as practically a pseudo-idol here.
The gallery users closely followed her every move, and the head moderator turned a blind eye to it.
The editor-in-chief of the journal opened the file as soon as he received the notification that the paper had been submitted.
A paper of the Riemann Hypothesis caliber could not be handled with simple administrative processing.
The editor-in-chief skimmed through it himself.
The cover page, the abstract, the table of contents, and the body of the text.
After reading for about twenty minutes, the editor-in-chief closed the file.
It was a paper he had already read when Yoo A-yeon's lecture was the talk of the town.
The only difference now was that each proof section had friendlier, more detailed explanations.
The scope was too broad to be reviewed by a small number of people.
They had to assemble a larger and more specialized review panel than for a typical paper.
Analytic number theory, operator theory, spectral geometry, functional analysis, and so on...
They needed to assign experts to each individual field.
The editor-in-chief began selecting the review panel.
Choosing the right reviewers was no easy task.
Someone to verify the definition of operators on Hilbert spaces.
Someone to examine the explicit formulas and the zero-estimation sections.
Someone to review the proof of the self-adjointness of the operators.
Someone to dissect the alignment between the trace formula and the eigenvalues.
A list of the top experts in each field was compiled.
The editor-in-chief narrowed down the list and contacted the scholars.
And everyone accepted immediately.
Since it was none other than the Riemann Hypothesis, one of humanity's greatest unsolved problems.
There was no reason to refuse.
The review process was completely confidential.
Outsiders had no way of knowing who was conducting the review.
However, those in academia could guess.
A certain professor at Princeton suddenly canceled a conference presentation.
A certain professor at Stanford postponed a collaborative research meeting by two months.
A certain professor at Cambridge became hard to reach for a while.
Even without anyone saying a word, they all knew.
They were surely dissecting Yoo A-yeon's paper right about now.
The first two months were quiet.
The reviewers examined their respective sections, and the academic community waited for the results.
As the third month passed, the atmosphere began to shift.
A quiet consensus began to form among the researchers who had been conducting informal verifications.
At first, they used cautious phrasing.
— We have examined it closely, but so far, we have found no logical gaps.
— We need to look into it further, but for now, there are no issues.
However.
As they entered the fourth month, those expressions gradually changed.
— This paper seems to be correct.
...was what they were saying.
The fifth month.
A change occurred in university seminars around the world.
The direction of the seminars held by researchers verifying Yoo A-yeon's paper shifted.
From verification to exposition.
They had moved past checking if the paper was correct and were now explaining its contents to others.
This movement signified only one thing.
They no longer assumed the possibility that the paper could be wrong.
The sixth month.
The journal's editor-in-chief posted a short statement on an academic community board.
The content was simple.
We assembled a review panel and examined the paper for several months, but we could find no errors. There are no gaps in the logic.
The Riemann Hypothesis has been proven true.
Similar statements continued to follow afterward.
Mathematicians from all over the world publicly declared their stances.
Through personal blogs, academic communities, or magazine interviews.
Though their wording differed, what they meant was this:
— We will no longer doubt.
This was how the academic consensus was forged.
There was no vote, nor was there a formal press conference.
The simple fact that the world's top experts no longer doubted.
Unlike in engineering fields.
In theoretical fields, that itself was the final verdict.
When Yoo A-yeon first held her lecture, it was merely a "claim."
But.
Once the academic community reached a consensus, the "claim" became "fact."
Catching onto this shift, the media quickly began plastering it across the front pages.
• Mathematics Community Virtually Certifies Yoo A-yeon's Proof of the Riemann Hypothesis
• A 160-Year-Old Mystery, Finally Solved
• 6-Year-Old Mathematician Yoo A-yeon Rewrites the History of Mathematics
Regardless of nationality, media outlets around the globe poured out articles declaring that Yoo A-yeon had truly solved the Riemann Hypothesis.
And.
Yoo A-yeon officially became the mathematician who proved the Riemann Hypothesis.