Chapter 224 - 139: Poaching

Chapter 224: Chapter 139: Poaching

The School of Mathematics building was an old one, its red-brick exterior walls covered in climbing ivy.

Inside a private office at the end of the second-floor hallway, a breeze blew across a desk piled high with draft paper, causing the edges of a few sheets to curl up slightly.

Li Jianming sat behind a large wooden desk. The tea in his mug had steeped to a dark brown. He took a sip, and the bitter liquid slid down his throat, jolting him awake, but it did little to quell his inner turmoil.

He was a veteran professor in the School of Mathematics who had spent half his life dealing with graph theory and complex networks.

That spring, he had taken the lead on a key project concerning large-scale network topology. The initial development of the theoretical framework had gone smoothly, but when they reached the core component—node redundancy calculation—the entire research group hit a wall.

For three straight months, they had tried every algorithm they could think of.

As the number of network nodes increased, the computational load exploded exponentially. The two computers in the lab ran day and night, only to inevitably run out of memory and crash.

They had hit a dead end.

No matter how they approached it, they couldn’t get around the massive demand on computing power. If they didn’t resolve this fundamental algorithmic bottleneck, the project was as good as dead.

Footsteps sounded outside the door, and a moment later, a graduate student in glasses pushed the door open and entered, carrying a stack of mail and journals.

"Teacher Li, here’s today’s mail, and the new issue of the foreign journal that just came in."

The student set the items on a corner of the desk, glanced at the dense wall of formulas on the blackboard, and, not daring to disturb him any longer, quietly backed out.

Li Jianming set down his tea mug and rubbed his throbbing temples. He idly sifted through the stack of mail, his eyes falling on the glossy journal at the top of the pile.

*Discrete Mathematics*, the fall issue.

It was an authoritative journal in the fields of graph theory and Discrete Mathematics.

Li Jianming picked it up out of habit and tore open the plastic wrapping. He flipped to the table of contents, his eyes quickly scanning the dense list of English titles, hoping to find a spark of inspiration in the latest research from his peers.

As his gaze traveled down the list, he paused halfway.

The title of one article had caught his eye.

The title was brief, something about node connectivity and matrix reduction in complex graph theory.

Such topics were common in *Discrete Mathematics*, but what truly gave Li Jianming pause was the author’s name.

"C. Zhuo, Huake University."

Li Jianming froze.

’Someone from Keda?’

He could count on one hand the people in the School of Mathematics capable of publishing a solo-authored paper in a journal of this caliber.

’C. Zhuo?’

’Chen? Cheng? Or Cao?’

’Whatever the surname, the School of Mathematics definitely had no professor, old or young, with those initials.’

A flicker of curiosity stirred, and Li Jianming flipped straight to the article’s page.

The article wasn’t long, only five pages in total.

He had only intended to give the article from his own university a casual glance, but his brow furrowed unconsciously as he finished the abstract.

He pulled open a drawer, took out a pair of reading glasses, and put them on. Leaning forward slightly, he fixed his eyes on the page.

There was no long-winded literature review, no flashy theoretical setup. Starting on the second page, the author cut straight to a matrix model.

Li Jianming’s breathing grew heavy.

He knew quality when he saw it.

The logic behind the paper’s matrix reduction method was brutally simple.

It forcefully severed the connections between complex nodes that would normally require exhaustive enumeration, then used a highly fault-tolerant algebraic matrix to lock them back down.

Li Jianming grabbed a pencil, pulled out a blank sheet of scratch paper, and, following the matrix in the journal, plugged in a data set from his own deadlocked project.

One line, then two.

In less than ten minutes, Li Jianming reached the final step of the calculation.

It worked.

The massive redundancy calculation that had plagued his research group for three months and repeatedly crashed their computers was, under the power of this matrix model, like tofu meeting a sharp knife—sliced through cleanly and effortlessly.

While it sacrificed a minuscule amount of precision in theory, the trade-off was a geometric reduction in the computational load.

In practical engineering and network applications, such a minuscule loss of precision was completely negligible!

Li Jianming took off his reading glasses, his eyes fixed on the name "C. Zhuo" on the page as he sank into deep thought.

’Since when did Keda have a hidden master with the surname Chen?’

’He’s definitely not in the School of Mathematics. If he were, I’d know about him.’

’The Department of Computer Science? Unlikely. This is pure algebraic graph theory.’

Suddenly, an idea flashed in Li Jianming’s mind.

「More than half a year ago.」

The Darian Team from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study had published a sensational paper on the boundary of topological singularities in *Physical Review Letters*, a top-tier physics journal.

Li Jianming had read that article back then.

He remembered it clearly. In the acknowledgments at the end of the paper, one line stood out: "With thanks to C. Zhuo of Hua Country Science and Technology University for the breakthrough in discrete grid models."

The pieces instantly clicked into place in Li Jianming’s mind.

The Princeton paper was in theoretical physics, and this Professor Chen had provided them with a physical boundary model. Now, this same person had published a masterpiece in Discrete Mathematics—a graph theory paper that solved the computational deadlock.

It was obvious where this person was located.

The School of Physics!

This had to be some hidden titan from the School of Physics, a master of theoretical physics and interdisciplinary studies!

Li Jianming couldn’t sit still any longer.

His project had been dragging on for far too long. His superiors were hounding him for results, and his students were burning themselves out.