My IQ Increases Year by Year

Chapter 208: Chapter 131: Still Have to Practice

The morning sun shone brightly over Keda.

There weren’t many people at the cafeteria’s service window.

Chen Zhuo bought two fried dough sticks, a meat bun, and a cup of steaming soy milk. The vendor yawned as he leaned against the stainless steel counter, a radio in front of him broadcasting the morning news.

Chen Zhuo took a bite of his meat bun and walked down the path toward the old library.

The large trees lining both sides of the path grew lushly, casting most of the walkway into shadow.

The air was a little stuffy, carrying the damp, grassy scent typical of a southern summer.

Chen Zhuo pushed open the glass door on the first floor of the old library.

The lobby was the same as always. An electric fan whirred behind the circulation desk, oscillating back and forth. The elderly administrator, holding a tea mug, was engrossed in a newspaper from the day before.

He pushed open the wooden door to the foreign periodicals reading room on the third floor.

The ceiling fan overhead spun lazily.

Su Wei was already there.

She was sitting in her usual spot by the window, her large-capacity water bottle beside her.

The same few sheets of scratch paper from yesterday were spread out on the table, but the formulas looked much neater than before. She had grown proficient in using the discrete matrix of a Markov chain, and there were far fewer corrections and scribbles on the page.

Hearing the door open, Su Wei looked up.

"Morning."

Chen Zhuo pulled out a chair and placed his shoulder bag on the table.

"Morning,"

Su Wei replied, but the pen in her hand didn’t stop as she continued calculating along yesterday’s train of thought.

Instead of heading straight for the bookshelves as usual, Chen Zhuo took a small notebook from his bag, tore out a blank sheet of paper, pulled a rollerball pen from the pen holder, and wrote a few lines on it.

When he was done, he stood up, walked over to Su Wei’s desk, and gently pushed the note toward her.

Su Wei finished the step she was working on, put down her pen, and picked up the note to look at it.

Her gaze lingered on the note for a moment, and her brow twitched slightly.

"The ones that have arrived in the last six months? You don’t want the historical bound volumes anymore?"

Su Wei looked up, a hint of surprise in her eyes.

For the past few days, Chen Zhuo had only asked her to find old relics from the sixties and seventies. The pages of those books were yellowed, and they crumbled when turned. Today’s request was quite a leap.

"Yeah."

Chen Zhuo pulled a nearby chair over and sat down, his tone gentle.

"I’ve spent so much time in the past, I should see how they’re building houses these days. If I keep digging through these old paper piles, I feel like I’ll get old myself."

A rare smile touched the corner of Su Wei’s mouth. She tucked the note under her pen holder.

"The new journals haven’t been shelved yet. They’re all in cardboard boxes in the storage room at the very back, still waiting to be unboxed and cataloged."

She stood up, tucking her chair back under the table as she did.

"Wait here. I’ll go check the back to see if we have what you’re looking for in the mathematics category."

"Sorry to trouble you."

Su Wei fished a ring of keys from her pocket and turned, walking toward a small wooden door in the deepest part of the reading room.

The sound of a lock turning was followed by the dull thuds of cardboard boxes being moved.

About ten minutes later, the small wooden door was pushed open.

Su Wei walked out, pushing a small metal cart on wheels.

Stacked on the cart were three or four piles of brand-new foreign journals, still wrapped in clear plastic film and bound tightly by several packing straps.

She parked the cart next to Chen Zhuo’s desk, pulled a utility knife from her pocket, and sliced along the edge of the plastic film.

"Here they are."

Su Wei tore off the plastic film she had cut open.

"Mathematical Annals, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, and a few issues of Discrete Mathematics. They’re all collections from the first half of this year, just sent over from abroad. They haven’t been cataloged, so when you read them, don’t mix up the months. It’ll make archiving a huge pain for me later."

"Don’t worry, I’ll put them right back where I found them when I’m done."

Chen Zhuo nodded, looking at the journals with their pristine covers on the cart.

Su Wei said no more. She turned and went back to her own seat to continue tackling her actuarial data.

Chen Zhuo picked up a copy of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory from the top of the pile.

The pages were smooth, and the layout was much cleaner and more beautiful than the typewritten manuscripts from decades ago.

The pages, filled with English text and neatly arranged formulas, had an air of industrial precision.

He opened the table of contents, chose an article on probabilistic graph theory, and began to read slowly.

He read with great focus.

It was only in this life, after he had truly passed through the gates of mathematics, that he came to deeply understand its infinite charm.

Take this article before him, for example.

The author was a mathematician from France, and the article explored the threshold function of random graphs under certain specific conditions.

To prove the inevitability of a low-probability event, the author used a very clever second moment method.

Chen Zhuo followed the deductive logic step by step. Whenever he encountered a larger leap in the process, he would pause, take a sheet of scratch paper, and fill in the omitted steps of the proof himself.

The scratch paper was soon filled with derived equations.

After calculating the final step and arriving at a conclusion identical to the one in the paper, Chen Zhuo put down his pen, picked up his water bottle, and took a sip.

He nodded to himself in approval.

This Frenchman’s approach was spot-on, his logical closure airtight.

Using probabilistic methods to solve deterministic problems in graph theory—this kind of cross-disciplinary thinking was quite advanced for the time.

This kind of reading brought him a pure sense of pleasure, as if he were having a quiet conversation with another intelligent mind across time and space.

He transcribed the paper’s core inequalities into his own notebook, then closed the journal, returned it to the cart, and picked up another.

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