My IQ Increases Year by Year

Chapter 211: Chapter 132: Wooden Board

For the next four or five days, life at Keda felt like it was on repeat.

Day broke, the temperature rose, cicadas chirped. Night fell, the temperature dropped a little. And so the cycle repeated.

Chen Zhuo’s daily routine remained a straight line between the cafeteria and the old library.

He didn’t change his routine just because he’d found the perfect angle of attack in that copy of *Discrete Mathematics*, nor did he start pulling all-nighters to prove it like some madman who had just discovered treasure.

Every day, those two pages of a half-finished matrix derivation draft were spread out punctually on his desk by the window.

But the time he spent on it each day, all told, never exceeded an hour and a half.

For the remaining seven or eight hours, he continued to pore over the brand-new foreign mathematics journals Su Wei had found for him, avidly absorbing cutting-edge mathematical concepts and refining the vast, complex algebraic toolbox in his mind.

Pursuing scholarship is a lot like making a good broth.

If you haven’t let it simmer long enough and try to force it with high heat, the broth often turns out bitter.

As for his proof of the graph theory lower bound, now that the algebraic framework was in place, all that remained was to treat it like a small wood carving, gently shaving off a tiny sliver each day.

It couldn’t be rushed.

Once all the logical gaps were filled, the piece would naturally be complete.

That afternoon, the sun outside was so brutal it felt like the sky was raining fire.

The few old ceiling fans in the reading room wobbled as they spun, barely stirring the stuffy air.

Chen Zhuo finished the last Chapter of the *Journal of Combinatorial Theory*, closed the book, and leaned back in his chair for a long stretch.

He’d been sitting for a little too long, and his bones gave a few soft pops.

He picked up the water bottle on his desk and shook it. It was empty.

Getting to his feet, Chen Zhuo carried his water bottle toward the water dispenser at the end of the hall.

As he passed Su Wei’s desk, he slowed his pace slightly, his gaze falling upon her workspace.

Su Wei wasn’t at her desk. He figured she’d gone to the restroom or to look for a book.

Her desk was still occupied by a tall stack of scratch paper and thick, specialized textbooks.

Beside them was a bundle of pen refills held together with an old rubber band.

About twenty of the thin, transparent plastic tubes were bundled neatly together, the metal tips at their ends showing faint traces of dried blue ink.

The ink inside every single one had been used up completely, without a single drop to spare.

Her copy of *Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics* was open to the Chapter on continuous-time random processes.

Chen Zhuo couldn’t resist a second glance, and his eyebrows arched slightly.

The two pages, densely printed with calculus symbols, were covered in crude red lines where Su Wei had crossed everything out.

She had mercilessly put large red X’s through the lengthy integral formulas used to calculate continuous expected values.

In the white space, and even crammed into the margins, she had rewritten everything in blue ink as matrix arrays.

Not only had she used the Markov chain transition matrix Chen Zhuo had taught her to untangle the knot she’d been stuck on, but she had gone on to deconstruct the entire Chapter. Every example and end-of-Chapter exercise involving continuous time series had been forcefully reworked and solved using this discrete algebra tool.

Just as Chen Zhuo was looking, Su Wei pushed open the door to the reading room and walked in.

She held a damp, freshly washed towel in her hand and was casually wiping the sweat from her face.

Seeing Chen Zhuo standing beside her desk and staring, she stopped and draped the towel over the back of her chair.

"What are you looking at? Did I get a formula wrong?"

Su Wei’s voice was still clear, though a bit raspy, and held not a trace of self-consciousness.

"You didn’t."

Chen Zhuo gestured toward the textbook, which was now altered beyond recognition, and made a good-natured joke.

"I’m just a little impressed. A few days ago, I thought your tools weren’t working for you, so I lent you a cleaver. But you didn’t just use it to chop vegetables. It looks like you went ahead and hacked up the cutting board, the stove, and even the kitchen doorframe while you were at it."

Su Wei glanced at her handiwork, her expression calm.

"A good tool should be used often."

She pulled out her chair and sat, smoothly grabbing a new refill from the pen holder and deftly unscrewing the pen barrel to replace it.

"You said it yourself. If I can chop a continuous timeline into discrete states, I can cut the computational load in half and have a higher tolerance for error. So why would I waste my energy calculating infinitesimals? If there’s a way to go around, why would I bang my head against a wall?"

Chen Zhuo looked at her matter-of-fact expression and gave a slightly resigned nod.

"That’s not wrong, but some problems involving continuity are designed specifically to test your understanding of the limits of calculus. By forcing a conversion into a Discrete Matrix, you might get an approximate numerical solution, but you lose a degree of theoretical precision."

"I don’t need absolute precision."

Su Wei looked up, her gaze direct, even carrying the kind of cold detachment unique to an actuary.

"The financial market is just an aggregate of human nature; no single formula can ever be one hundred percent accurate. In the future, if I take the actuarial exams or build risk management models, my boss won’t care if I can write a beautiful calculus function. He’ll want risk assessment data with a manageable margin of error, delivered in the shortest time possible."

She reached out and tapped the square matrix on her scratch paper.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!