5
Chapter 5. It’s Hard to See What’s Right Under Your Nose
The lecture hall remained silent.
Even after Professor Ibrahim’s question, the students merely glanced at one another. Not a single person raised a hand.
“Fine! Let’s do it this way!”
Ibrahim let out an incredulous laugh, pulled out his wallet, and took out a crisp hundred-dollar bill. He then firmly pinned it to a corner of the blackboard with a thumbtack.
“Until the person who solved this problem comes forward, this hundred dollars belongs to no one.”
The sight of the green bill pinned to the blackboard stirred a loud commotion among the students.
A hundred dollars was a considerable sum for students in those days. Pointing at the blackboard, Professor Ibrahim continued calmly.
“I hope the rightful owner of this hundred dollars shows up as soon as possible. Make sure you tell the students who are absent today, too. Tell them there’s money pinned to the blackboard, so they should hurry over and claim it!”
The students stared in disbelief, looking back and forth between the equations and the hundred-dollar bill.
Professor Ibrahim opened the attendance sheet in his hand.
He needed to check whether the person responsible might be one of the students who wasn’t present.
“Since we’re on the subject, I might as well take attendance for the first time in a while. The owner of this hundred dollars could be among those who aren’t here.”
Ibrahim began calling out names one by one.
“Eric Johnson?”
“Yes, Professor.”
“Michael Brown?”
“Here.”
Ibrahim briefly scanned the faces of the students who answered before moving on to the next name.
Whenever a name went unanswered, his eyebrows twitched slightly.
“David Miller?”
“...”
“Absent?”
“Yes. I heard he has a severe stomachache.”
“I see.”
Professor Ibrahim marked the attendance sheet and looked at the equations on the blackboard once more.
Eventually, he called out every name on the list, but the identity of the hundred-dollar bill’s owner remained a mystery.
Ibrahim glanced at the bill pinned to the corner of the blackboard and clicked his tongue.
“Let’s begin class!”
“Yes, Professor!”
Late afternoon, Harvard University’s Memorial Hall.
After finishing his classes, Professor Ibrahim strode into Harvard’s mathematics building as though he owned the place.
He was there to meet his close friend, Professor Stanley, and discuss the solution someone had left on the blackboard the previous day.
“...!”
Clunk.
However, the moment he opened the door, Stanley’s behavior struck him as suspicious.
Unlike his usual self, Professor Stanley looked flustered and hurriedly hid the papers on his desk behind his back.
“I saw everything, Stanley! What are you hiding?”
Professor Ibrahim glared at him sharply.
“Oh, Ibrahim! How many times have I told you to knock before barging in? It’s nothing!”
Professor Stanley sank deep into his chair, pretending to be calm, but Ibrahim wasn’t fooled. He had already approached the desk and reached out his hand.
“If it’s nothing, then let me see what you’re hiding behind your back.”
“Come on, what’s gotten into you? I told you it’s nothing.”
“Then let me see. Wait a minute. Why do you look so guilty? Don’t tell me you’re cheating on Catherine! Is that a love letter? Hand it over before I tell Catherine everything!”
“Good grief, man! This is my private business! Hey, let go of my hand!”
“That just makes you look even more suspicious! Give it here!”
The two energetic professors, both in their early forties, began struggling over the desk like a pair of schoolboys. Eventually, Ibrahim managed to snatch the piece of paper from Stanley’s hand.
“W-What is this? A r-recommendation letter?”
The name written at the top of the paper as the recommended candidate was Leo.
Professor Ibrahim’s face twisted instantly.
“Stanley, have you lost your mind? Why is Leo’s name written here? Surely you don’t mean the same boy I’m thinking of?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Good grief! So it is him. How could you even consider pulling a stunt like this?”
“What’s wrong with it? I’m trying to recruit a talented kid!”
Now that he had been caught, Professor Stanley cleared his throat and straightened his clothes as though there were no point in hiding anything anymore.
“Listen here, Stanley. I know you want Leo, but this is going too far. Do you have any idea how much money I’ve spent buying fruit from that family? Grapes, apples, and everything else. I’ve probably spent enough to buy a house! You know perfectly well how much effort I’ve put into winning him over. This is against every rule of fair play!”
Professor Ibrahim’s face flushed with indignation.
“Hahaha! You’re not the only one making an effort. My daughter, April, is Leo’s best friend. Do you think someone as strict with his daughter as I am would let the two of them spend time together for no reason?”
“Wow! Jesus! There isn’t a single person in this world you can trust! And to think you’d stab me in the back! You, of all people, my friend!”
Professor Ibrahim let out an incredulous laugh.
“Come on, my friend! Calm down. A genius like Leo belongs in the great tradition of pure mathematics. Are you planning to drag him into an engineering building that reeks of machine oil and turn him into some engineering nerd like yourself? I will never allow that.”
Ibrahim burst into disbelieving laughter and pointed at the desk in front of Stanley.
“Look at you! What’s wrong with being an engineer? In that case, throw away that IBM computer on your desk right now. Get rid of the desk lamp you’re using, your telephone, and even that German car you drive around in every day! They’re all products of civilization that our engineering nerds worked themselves to the bone to create!”
Professor Ibrahim leaned so close to Stanley that their faces were almost touching and continued.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, no! Don’t you think it’s awfully hypocritical for a lofty mathematician like you to spend every day touching and using things made by those supposedly lowly engineering nerds? You claim to pursue only the truths of the universe, yet you can’t get through a single day without our engineering inventions!”
“They’re merely tools for academic research!”
“Tools, my foot! Theoreticians always have such fancy words! Humans are tool-using animals, after all. Leo’s talent should be used to design systems that actually move the world forward. I won’t let him waste his life proving theorems on paper like you do. Absolutely not!”
Professor Ibrahim clenched his teeth.
“I’m not giving in this time, either! Leo is mine.”
“What do you mean, yours? Is Leo some kind of object? Anyway, I’m confiscating this recommendation letter for now. Remember that! You should know better than to reach for something that’s out of your league!”
“Hmph! Do whatever you want. I can just write another one!”
Professor Stanley huffed angrily, but perhaps the absurdity of the situation finally got to him, because he burst out laughing.
A little later,
Once the commotion over Leo’s recommendation letter had died down, Professor Ibrahim finally brought up the matter that had been occupying his thoughts since that morning.
“Stanley, putting that aside, I came here because there’s something I need to discuss with you.”
“Discuss something? What is it?”
“Someone hacked into my brain.”
“Haaah? What kind of nonsense is that? Honestly, engineers!”
“What do engineers have to do with this? That’s not what I mean. The thing is...”
Professor Ibrahim gave Stanley a detailed account of the astonishing incident that had occurred that morning.
“What? Someone solved the problem of optimizing an algorithm to control nonlinear variables in fluid dynamics? One of your students?”
Professor Stanley narrowed his eyes.
It was one of the most difficult problems imaginable.
It was far beyond the level undergraduate students could handle.
“No. Not one of my students.”
“Then who was it? Did the ghost of Euler or Gauss come back from the dead?”
“Haaah, you call that a joke? Anyway, someone worked through the whole thing with astonishing ease. And it wasn’t just a matter of getting the answer right. They completely penetrated the logical progression I had in mind! I got goosebumps the moment I saw it!”
Professor Ibrahim rubbed both arms as he spoke.
At that, Professor Stanley rose from his chair.
“Exactly! If it wasn’t the ghost of Gauss, then who was it?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I even took attendance to check, but the culprit wasn’t there. So I pinned a hundred-dollar bill to the corner of the blackboard and told them to claim it if they were the one who solved the problem.”
Professor Ibrahim rubbed his forehead and continued.
“You cheapskate! You encountered talent like this and offered a mere hundred dollars? You should have put up at least a thousand!”
“You’re being particularly irritating today, aren’t you?”
“Listen, I’m not joking. That student is worth every penny!”
“Hmm. Still, there’s something strange about this.”
“What is it now?”
“The handwriting on the blackboard didn’t look like an adult’s. It looked as though a child had written it.”
Stanley immediately waved his hands dismissively.
“Come on, Ibrahim. You must have been so excited that you saw things incorrectly. Plenty of my students have terrible handwriting the moment they pick up a piece of chalk. If someone is scribbling equations across a blackboard, their handwriting can easily look that way. Besides, this problem is far beyond anything a child could possibly handle.”
“That’s true, isn’t it? I thought so too, but...”
As Professor Ibrahim tilted his head, Stanley’s expression suddenly changed.
It looked as though a thought had just struck him.
“Wait! Ibrahim, could it have been that boy?”
“Who? Surely you don’t mean Leo?”
“Yes, Leo! You mentioned earlier that Leo had visited your office that day. What if he happened to walk past the lecture hall? He might have seen the blackboard when the room was empty.”
At Stanley’s suggestion, Ibrahim tilted his head.
“You’re supposed to be a clearheaded mathematician. Do you realize you’re writing a ridiculous work of fantasy fiction right now?”
“Listen to me! When measuring the rate of change of a function, if you focus too much on the slope at the reference point, you can fail to notice the straight line passing through that point. You’ve fixed a false constant in your mind: that anyone capable of solving this problem must naturally possess talent at your own level. As a result, you might have overlooked the variable named Leo, who comes into your office carrying fruit all the time.”
“Hmm. Even so, are you seriously suggesting Leo solved it?”
“Come on! Have you forgotten why we were fighting over that recommendation letter a moment ago? We have nothing to lose by checking. Why not find out whether Leo is the owner of that hundred dollars?”
“...”
Professor Ibrahim nodded.
Although the idea seemed unbelievable, the image of the handwriting on the blackboard kept overlapping with Leo’s face in his mind.
“All right. I’ll check tomorrow. But if Leo really is the owner of that hundred dollars, you can consider your recommendation letter permanently confiscated.”
“What? I told you I’m not giving in, either!”
As Professor Ibrahim picked up the recommendation letter and stood, Professor Stanley pushed back his chair and rose to his feet as well.
“Go ahead and try. I’m leaving now.”
“Hey, Ibrahim! Why are you in such a hurry? I’ve finished all my lectures for today, too. Let’s go grab a drink for a change.”
At Stanley’s invitation, Professor Ibrahim stopped with his hand on the doorknob.
“Oops! Professor Stanley! How could a distinguished algebraist like yourself possibly stoop to share a drink with a lowly person like me? It would be an infinite honor, of course, but I’ll have to decline today.”
Professor Ibrahim slowly shook his head.
“Why? Are you still upset about what happened today?”
“Not at all. A humble engineer like me should simply do what engineering nerds do best and go out to earn some money.”
Professor Stanley gave a helpless laugh and waved his hand in disbelief.
“Come on, are you still holding on to what I said earlier? So where are you going to earn this money?”
“I’m meeting the chairman of Walmart. I have a dinner appointment with him tonight.”
Professor Stanley’s eyes widened.
“The chairman of Walmart? You mean Sam Walton?”
“That’s right. I heard Walmart has begun a major project to develop its logistics system. They’ve been practically begging a humble engineer like me to give them some advice. Of course, someone as noble as you, who spends his life exploring the sublime language of the universe, wouldn’t understand. But we engineers live for the satisfaction of making the world a more convenient place.”
Professor Ibrahim winked and turned to leave.
“You cheapskate!”
“Hahaha! Yes, yes, the cheapskate is leaving now. See you later, Stanley! Once I get my consulting fee, this cheapskate will buy the drinks!”
“Hey! Ibrahim! Are you seriously going to do this? At least give me back the recommendation letter!”
“Write another one! It’ll be a waste of effort anyway!”
Leaving Stanley’s shouts behind him, Professor Ibrahim walked down the corridor outside the offices.
However, as he descended the staircase at the end of the hall, his steps gradually slowed.
Professor Ibrahim stopped and fiddled with Leo’s recommendation letter tucked inside his jacket.
Could it really have been that boy?