Chapter 103 - 74: Not a Single One
Time ticked by, second by second. The conference room was silent.
Chen Lin, for his part, hadn’t noticed any of Professor Gu’s expressions or movements.
When he entered his "Little Mathematician" state, it was as if the entire outside world had been covered by a translucent filter, becoming blurry and distant.
His entire mind was completely focused on the mathematical calculations before him, a world built of symbols, axioms, and logic.
Before the exam, he had been thinking, ’One test per hour, so three tests will take three hours. That puts me right at the safety threshold I set for myself. It might even be a tight squeeze.’
But once he actually began, he realized he was much faster than he had imagined.
For about half of the problems, the entire process—from reading the question to writing down the final answer—took no more than five minutes.
There was even one mathematical analysis problem where the solution flashed through his mind, so concise it surprised even him. He wrote just five eloquent lines and perfectly completed the proof.
The remaining half of the problems were slightly more difficult, but they merely required a few more mental gymnastics, taking only about seven or eight minutes each.
This allowed Chen Lin to breathe a secret sigh of relief.
’At this rate, I’ll definitely be able to finish all three exams well within the three-hour limit.’
...
...
「4:50 PM.」
As Chen Lin wrote the final punctuation mark on the topology exam, he slowly set down his pen, leaned back in his chair, and let out a long sigh.
That familiar exhaustion from having consumed his Spiritual Power slowly emerged, like reefs revealed by a receding tide.
While nowhere near as intense as it had been on the night of the 15th, it was still enough to make his brain feel a little heavy.
He looked up and noticed Professor Gu Ming across from him, staring intently at his laptop screen. The professor’s finger occasionally swiped across the trackpad, as if he were immersed in a research paper, completely unaware that Chen Lin was done.
"Professor Gu?" Chen Lin called out softly.
"Hmm?" Gu Ming, as if just roused from deep thought, first looked up blankly. Then he saw the three exam papers in front of Chen Lin, all filled with writing, and his expression instantly switched from focus to astonishment.
"You’re finished?" he asked, instinctively glancing at his watch. The hour hand had not yet reached five.
’We started at two. It hasn’t even been three hours.’
Gu Ming quickly reined in his blatant surprise, recovering his professorial composure. He smiled and nodded, his tone carrying undisguised praise. "Excellent, truly excellent! You finished much faster than I anticipated."
He stood up, walked over to Chen Lin’s side, and asked, "How did you find it? Was the difficulty of the problems manageable?"
"They were fine. Not too difficult," Chen Lin replied honestly.
Gu Ming smiled, not taking what sounded a bit like a humblebrag too seriously.
He gestured toward the remaining two subjects. "So, same time tomorrow?"
Chen Lin thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, that works. Thank you, Professor Gu."
"No trouble at all, no trouble at all." Gu Ming waved his hand, his eyes filled with growing appreciation for Chen Lin. "Alright, you should head back and get some rest. You’ve worked hard today."
"Alright. Goodbye, Professor Gu."
Chen Lin quickly gathered his things and took his leave.
As the conference room door clicked shut, the smile slowly faded from Gu Ming’s face. He instinctively reached out to tidy the table, but his gaze happened to fall on the stack of pristine white A4 paper at his side.
He suddenly remembered: Chen Lin hadn’t touched a single sheet of the scratch paper he had specially prepared!
A jolt of shock ran through Gu Ming.
’Is anyone’s mental calculation ability really this strong? To solve problems of this caliber without needing a single bit of scratch work?’
With a trace of disbelief, he gathered Chen Lin’s three completed exams and gave them a cursory flip-through.
That quick glance only deepened his shock.
The answer space for every single problem was filled.
To be clear, in order to accurately gauge the depths of Chen Lin’s abilities, he had secretly ramped up the difficulty when creating the tests.
At least half of the problems on these three exams required graduate-level mathematical knowledge and tools to be solved successfully.
Moreover, to test Chen Lin’s upper limits, he had even slipped a final question of doctoral qualifying exam difficulty into each test!
He had originally expected Chen Lin to correctly answer most of the undergraduate-level problems and perhaps attempt the graduate-level ones. That in itself would have been considered an outstanding performance.
’But now, it looked like Chen Lin had finished every single problem?’
Considering he was a transfer student from the College of Liberal Arts, this meant that almost all his mathematical knowledge was self-taught.
That rate of learning was simply staggering!
Gu Ming took a deep breath, pushing the thoughts aside.
Carrying the three heavy stacks of paper, he walked briskly back to his office, pulled the corresponding answer key he’d prepared from a drawer, and began to grade.
「Half an hour later.」
Gu Ming leaned back in his office chair, staring blankly at the three exams spread out on the desk before him.
In the top right corner of each exam, a number was written in bold, glaring red ink.
100.
100.
100.
He had expected Chen Lin’s scores to be high.
But for him to finish all three exams in under three hours and get a perfect score on every single one... that was far beyond his wildest imagination.
Just moments before, he had meticulously checked all thirty problems, comparing every single step of every solution against his own answer key.
There wasn’t a single error.
The logic was rigorous, the steps were clear, and the solutions were as perfect as standard examples from a textbook.
What was even more astounding was that when he graded the mathematical analysis exam, he came across that five-line proof.
The method Chen Lin had used was even more concise and elegant than the official solution he had prepared!
Gu Ming’s gaze lingered on those five short lines of proof for a long time, and he unconsciously muttered to himself:
"’In a Banach space, weak relative compactness is equivalent to every sequence having a weakly convergent subsequence... so, you can directly extract a weakly convergent subsequence from the bounded sequence {x_n} to complete the proof... When I originally designed this problem, how did I not think of this approach...’
He shook his head with a wry smile, took off his glasses, and pressed his fingers firmly against the bridge of his nose.
’Is this what a true genius is?’
He himself had graduated from Modu Jiao Tong University, then traveled to the United Kingdom to earn his doctorate from Cambridge University. Throughout his academic career, he had seen countless so-called "geniuses" and "prodigies."
But as Gu Ming carefully searched his memory, he found that among all the people he knew, those who had reached Chen Lin’s current level by the age of twenty...
There wasn’t a single one!