I Got an Omnipotent Brain

”Should I address you as Countess?”

At Seo-ha’s question, Cecilia burst into laughter.

”Call me Cecilia. This is America, and I’m not here as Lady Ashley right now.”

Seo-ha still couldn’t take his eyes off her.

The direct descendant of Ada Lovelace, the pioneer of the Analytical Engine that became the foundation of the computer. He couldn’t believe he was face to face with someone who could be called the history of mathematics itself.

”What brings you here?”

”Nothing particular. Isn’t responding to an invitation one of the virtues a noble ought to have? You can think of it as my answer to your provocation.”

”Ah.... I did clearly write that I welcomed everyone up to fourth place. There were circumstances, but I don’t intend to make excuses. Feel free to look around the lab as much as you like. And please let me know anytime if there’s anything you need.”

”I won’t hold back, then.”

Cecilia slipped off her elegant coat and draped it over a chair.

She rose from her seat and walked lightly through the lab, slowly taking in the interior. Seo-ha and his teammates gathered as usual and began exchanging opinions. The blackboard already bore formulas written in several different hands, as if this wasn’t their first time doing this.

’He recognized me at a glance.’

She glanced sidelong at Seo-ha.

Her great-great-grandmother, Ada Lovelace, had lived through an unfortunate childhood.

She had no memory of ever meeting her father, Lord Byron, in person. He had been a rock star who enjoyed explosive popularity across all of Europe thanks to his striking looks, rebellious temperament, and overwhelming literary talent. He separated from his wife and left England a mere month after his daughter was born. And when she was eight years old, he died during the Greek War of Independence.

Ada’s mother Isabella lived in extreme fear that her daughter would inherit the father’s wild, poetic nature. That was why she steered her daughter away from literature and art and toward mathematics and science alone.

’Though it didn’t work.’

Ada became a brilliant mathematician, just as her mother had intended, but even she could not erase the literary sensibility flowing through her blood. She grew into an adult who possessed both cold logic and a burning artistic soul.

Poetic Mathematics,

This was the ideal she had pursued. And Cecilia, who had inherited Ada’s physical and mental legacy in abundance, wanted to realize that ideal herself.

’Not everything meaningful is beautiful.’

She nodded at the blackboard as if evaluating a poem.

Mathematics was the highest-order language, and proof ought to be art made with it. Cecilia’s gaze stopped on a formula written in the center of the blackboard.

”An ugly formula.”

Efficient, but crude.

It gave her the impression of a cargo truck haphazardly modified to haul a load and get to its destination as quickly as possible.

’This must have been written by that one.’

Everything seeped out from a person’s actions, way of speaking, and demeanor. To her, human beings were entities each possessing their own unique mathematical signature.

’This part, the woman.’

Reckless and bold.

If it were a painting, it would look like a rough abstract piece. The raw, unpolished yearning bled through the formula, and it made her smile.

Theodore’s formulas were the exact opposite of hers.

Meticulous and logical, but somehow mechanical and cold. Less like poetry or a novel, more like a well-written manual. It was a style that didn’t suit her aesthetic at all.

Quickly losing interest, Cecilia turned her gaze elsewhere.

”Ah!”

An exclamation escaped her before she knew it.

A development that was concise yet graceful, a perfect reduction without a single unnecessary term, and a stubborn insistence on perfect symmetry. The theorem on the blackboard shook her heart as violently as the first time she had read a Shakespearean sonnet (Sonnet * a poem of fourteen lines with a strict metrical structure).

There was no need to even ask who the owner of the formula was.

After composing her expression, Cecilia slowly turned and looked at Seo-ha. A faint smile spread across her lips. This kind of aesthetic couldn’t be acquired through training. Logic was something anyone could learn, but the elegance that seeped through it belonged only to the realm of the chosen.

Seo-ha picked up a piece of chalk.

”Here, let’s try assuming that the zeros of the zeta function could lie off the critical line. Then the symmetry of the statistical distribution would break down, wouldn’t it? From there, let’s start with a reactive approach. The premise that the Riemann Hypothesis is wrong might actually guide us to the truth.”

After a brief break, the team had agreed to once again sprint toward the Riemann Hypothesis.

”That’s a tremendously sensational approach.”

Theo clicked his tongue in amazement.

Scholars who seriously dug into the Riemann Hypothesis always ended up obsessing over symmetry. If one could prove that Noether’s Theorem (Noether’s Theorem * the theorem that every symmetry has a corresponding conservation law) held for the Riemann Hypothesis, that in itself would be a groundbreaking breakthrough.

”Let’s hypothesize one rogue zero off the critical line. This is going to get insanely complicated.”

Su-jeong said, furrowing her delicate brows.

Sri suddenly shot up from his seat as if something had clicked.

”Huh? Seo-ha, are you by any chance thinking that this zero will shift?”

Seo-ha nodded and marked a single point in empty space, far from the critical line.

”Exactly. The moment this point exists, the balance of prime numbers we’ve trusted all along collapses. But I think this collapse doesn’t end in chaos; it generates an immense mathematical tension across the whole system. Like a rubber band trying to snap back to its original position when you pull it forcibly.”

The three of them swallowed hard.

If they could prove this, they’d be able to completely clarify the Hilbert-Polya Conjecture, raised a century ago, too.

’Hm?’

Seo-ha turned his head.

Cecilia was wandering around with a curiously floating step. As if she had no interest in the conversation at all, she would peer at a framed picture on the wall, then slowly pass behind their backs with the deliberate click-clack of her heels.

Then she would subtly stop and steal glances at the formulas on the blackboard.

”Is there something wrong?”

At Seo-ha’s question, her shoulders twitched.

When she turned around, her face bore an unmistakable expression of someone whose mouth was itching so much she couldn’t stand it.

”Is it really okay to treat me like an invisible person? I might just walk off with your precious research, you know.”

Seo-ha grinned and replied.

”Someone as noble as Lady Ashley would never do such a thing. Though honestly, I think it wouldn’t matter even if you did.”

She narrowed her eyes.

”So you think nobody but you can solve it?”

”That’s not it, but if there’s anyone who could solve the Riemann Hypothesis with just this much of a hint, wouldn’t they more than deserve the praise? And....”

”And?”

”Because you’ve been looking at the formulas as intently as a visitor at an art gallery.”

At Seo-ha’s sharp powers of observation, Cecilia’s cheeks flushed slightly. She cleared her throat with an ’ahem, ahem’, then strode forward and picked up a piece of chalk.

”Mind if I add a little?”

”Please, go ahead.”

When Seo-ha nodded, Cecilia began writing annotations on the blackboard without hesitation. Her handwriting had a different sort of quality from Seo-ha’s tidy hand: flamboyant, yet possessing a dashing, unrestrained spirit.

”I believe mathematics is a language that expresses the invisible order of the real world.”

Scratch scratch.

Cecilia continued speaking as she wrote out the formulas.

”Just as a poet describes emotion through human language, a mathematician handles the principles of the universe through formulas.”

”That resonates with Countess Lovelace’s thinking.”

She nodded.

”She was a mathematician, but she was also very sensitive in an artistic way. At the same time, when it came to intuition and creativity, she was a genius no one in her era could match. It was my ancestor who saw Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and completed the concepts of the algorithm and the computer.”

She paused and drew a gentle curve over the formula on the blackboard. It was the path of a Complex Line Integral flowing around the rogue zero Seo-ha had hypothesized.

The curve embraced the range of tension Seo-ha had set, creating an almost eerily harmonious geometric form.

”Ah.... that’s less mathematics and more something like aesthetic intuition, perhaps?”

”No, it’s mathematically valid too. Looks like she’s applying the symmetry of the L-function.”

Theo added an explanation to Su-jeong’s question.

”Amazing. So there are people who approach mathematics this way.”

She viewed the universe within the grand framework of harmony. Her unique interpretation of ’Poetic Mathematics’ was resonating with Seo-ha’s hypothesis.

”This is an extremely personal opinion, but any theorem that doesn’t hold geometrically and harmonically must be wrong somewhere. The universe never tolerates dissonance.”

Cecilia set down the chalk and glanced back.

Seo-ha grasped the meaning of the curve she had drawn in an instant. She was interpreting the tension he had described as the tuning necessary for the instrument that is this universe to produce chords.

A new path rose in Seo-ha’s mind like a lightbulb switching on.

”That’s a truly brilliant idea. We could extend the meaning a bit further from there.”

Seo-ha took over the chalk and began drawing figures.

The line that started at his fingertips rode along the curve Cecilia had drawn, then soon gave the illusion of crossing the boundary of the blackboard and being drawn in midair.

A curve that drew complex symmetries and repeated geometric expansions without end.

”How beautiful....”

An exclamation burst from Cecilia’s red lips.

The figure Seo-ha had drawn was like a flower of geometry blooming from the universe. A slender stem starting at the critical line in the center embraced the zero and unfurled its petals. And from the tips of those petals, small new lines sprouted, repeating a new order.

Each petal was the trajectory of function values that determined the distribution of primes. And at every point where they overlapped and interlocked, mathematical inevitability was embedded like jewels, sparkling.

Seo-ha set down the chalk with a sheepish smile.

”The actual proof wouldn’t look like this. I just tried to express the inspiration I got from your approach.”

When Seo-ha reached for the eraser as if embarrassed, Theo startled and hurried to stop him.

”Wa... wait!”

Click.

Click.

Su-jeong and Sri also couldn’t speak for a while in front of the blackboard. To them, who always viewed the world only through numbers, the flower of geometry that Seo-ha and Cecilia had created together came as that much of a greater shock.

”I knew we’d be able to communicate.”

Cecilia lightly brushed away tears with her fingers, then picked up the coat she’d left on the chair.

”I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Seo-ha’s face went blank.

”What? You’re not heading back to England?”

Without waiting for an answer, she moved with an elegant gesture. Having grasped the doorknob, she paused for a moment and looked back at Seo-ha.

”My seat should be over there by the window. The butler will take care of the paperwork, so keep that in mind.”

Cecilia stepped out of the building.

A turquoise Rolls-Royce, gleaming without a speck of dust, was parked in front of the main gate. Students walked by, staring at it as though on a sightseeing trip. The butler, who had been waiting beside the car at attention, spotted her and bowed politely at the waist.

”You’ve come out, my lady.”

The butler carefully took the coat Cecilia was wearing and the bag in her hand.

As she sank into the plush back seat, the butler glanced at the rearview mirror and spoke cautiously.

”You’re looking cheerful. It seems the atmosphere of the lab was to your liking.”

She stared at the building receding through the window. It felt as though the flower Seo-ha had drawn was spreading out in every direction from there, filling the entire sky.

”Not really.”

She replied indifferently, resting her chin on the window frame.

But he knew very well that the young countess was in an exceptionally good mood right now.

*****

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