Chapter 215 - 207: The Bare Minimum of Respect

Chapter 215: Chapter 207: The Bare Minimum of Respect

It was almost ten o’clock when Li Dong left the library.

Pushing open the door to his dorm room, he saw that Liu Qiang and Chen Nan had already gone home.

The only person left in the room was Wang Hao, keeping a lonely vigil.

Wang Hao was on his bottom bunk, reading a book.

Li Dong leaned in for a curious look.

Whoa!

Strogatz’s *Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos*.

Underneath it were Jiang Qiyuan’s *Mathematical Model* and Han Zhonggen’s *Mathematical Modeling Methods and Their Applications*.

Wang Hao was currently holding several papers printed from ResearchGate, their covers marked with highlights he’d made himself.

To be honest, that pile of books would be enough to stun eighty percent of all STEM guys.

The truth is, there’s a huge difference between "mathematical modeling" and "proper" mathematics.

Proper mathematics, like the kind Li Dong was currently working on, demanded a perfectly seamless line of logic from premise to conclusion, with no ambiguity in between.

Mathematical modeling, on the other hand, was about taking all the messy stuff from the real world.

Things like stock prices, traffic flow, viral transmission, power grid dispatching... you’d cram it all into a mathematical framework of your own creation and then use that framework to approximate the truth.

The goal was usefulness.

So don’t ever think mathematical modeling is just a glorified version of high school word problems.

To win a National First Prize in a competition at the level of CUMCM, you need to understand optimization, stochastic processes, nonlinear dynamic systems, academic writing, and even a bit of psychology.

Because you have to guess what kind of model the judging committee will like.

When you get to the highest level, this stuff is a true interdisciplinary arena.

So Wang Hao wasn’t just trying to look cool by wrestling with Strogatz; he genuinely needed it.

"Haozi."

Li Dong called out as he took off his jacket.

"Got anything to eat?"

Wang Hao looked up, a little puzzled.

"You haven’t eaten?"

"Nope." Li Dong plopped down onto his chair.

"You know how I didn’t take physics? Well, Old Zhou gave me a physics problem and said he’d only approve my leave request if I solved it."

"I was stuck in the library all afternoon."

The moment Wang Hao heard that, he stopped what he was doing.

Something instantly lit up in his eyes.

A spark.

Physics.

He *had* taken physics. He’d gotten a ninety on his mechanics final this semester.

In a ridiculously competitive college like Yuanpei, that score put him in the top ten of the entire college, a feat even more impressive than getting an eighty-five in Mathematical Analysis in the School of Mathematics.

Wang Hao had already resigned himself to the fact that he could never catch up to a monster like Li Dong in mathematics in this lifetime.

But physics...

He might just have a fighting chance.

"Hey, let me see it."

Wang Hao leaned over, his interest piqued.

Li Dong didn’t hide it, pulling the folded A4 paper from his pocket and casually handing it over.

Wang Hao took it.

The problem on the page was printed very neatly.

He recognized every word.

Consider a four-dimensional compact Euclidean manifold... SU(N) gauge field... Dirac spinor... chiral transformation... Atiyah-Singer index theorem... Adler-Bardeen theorem...

Wang Hao read it with a grin, though his smile was a bit stiff.

Then.

Very slowly, he squeezed a single word from his lips.

"Solved."

And that was the end of that.

’Well, I guess that counts as solving it instantly, right?’

He refolded the paper, handed it back to Li Dong very politely, and wore a restrained smile.

"This problem... hmm."

"It’s pretty interesting."

After speaking, he turned, walked to his drawer, pulled it open, and fumbled for a packet of Master Kong Braised Beef-flavored instant noodles.

"Here."

Li Dong was just about to say thanks when Wang Hao had already climbed back onto his bunk.

And then...

"SWOOSH—"

He yanked the bed curtain shut.

His entire figure vanished into the shadows.

The dorm room instantly fell silent.

Li Dong held the packet of instant noodles, his mouth twitching as he stared at the freshly closed curtain.

He knew he’d dealt a bit of a blow to Wang Hao.

But he also knew Wang Hao’s personality; the guy could take a hit.

In fact, every time he was knocked down, he came back stronger, just like a Saiyan.

If it weren’t for the repeated blows from Li Dong, why would this guy have even signed up for CUMCM?

Wasn’t this the perfect example of someone who grows stronger from setbacks?

’Haozi, don’t you worry,’ Li Dong thought to himself.

’When the time comes, if your national competition project really makes it to the final review, I will definitely...’

’...meticulously and rigorously check every one of your model’s assumptions, every line of your code’s comments, and every single one of your references.’

’I won’t slack off in the slightest.’

’That’s the least amount of respect Brother Dong can give you.’

Li Dong smiled and shook his head. He got up to make the instant noodles, wolfed them down in a few quick bites, and then prepared to get to work.

He closed his eyes, his abilities cranked up to the max.

’This time! I won’t just memorize, I will understand...’

The gates to his Memory Palace swung open with a CLICK.

The sounds of the world around him began to fade away.

The whistling of the wind outside, the faint, almost imaginary whimpering from behind Wang Hao’s curtain...

...

「Shanghai. Huaxuan Technology, Lithography R&D Center, third basement level.」

Zhang Mo operated the tablet, his palms slick with sweat.

The tablet displayed streams of data...

...real-time pressure gradients of the 3D thermo-fluid coupled field inside the immersion chamber, refractive index fluctuations, sub-nanometer oscillations in the liquid film thickness...

All these parameters, once considered "unsolvable in real-time," were now refreshing on his tablet every three microseconds.

He took a deep breath and looked up, his voice trembling.

"President Lin."

"It’s ready."

Lin Wei, who was normally the calmest of them all, sat across from him, holding a printed system status report.

His hand was trembling too.

Lin Wei stood up and spoke a single word.

"Go."

Zhang Mo immediately led him, walking briskly toward Verification Chamber One.

Soon, the double airlock doors of the verification chamber opened. Lin Wei walked in, with Zhang Mo close behind.

The people inside the verification chamber were all from National Power Equipment.

The chief engineer of National Power Equipment’s Lithography Overall Design Department.

Elder He, who had once led the system integration and testing of Huaxia’s first domestically produced immersion lithography machine.

The head of the Fluid Dynamics and Flow Field Control Group.

Elder Zhao, who had been rehired after retiring from the Seventh Machine Department. He was eighty-two years old, his hair completely white, but his eyes still held a spark.

There were also several others whose names weren’t widely known, but whose résumés, if any one of them were made public, would send shockwaves through the domestic semiconductor industry.

Nineteen people in total.

All of them stood before the main control console of the immersion lithography machine.

No one spoke.

The only sounds in the entire verification chamber were the whirring of the fans from the dozens of monitors on the console and the breathing of nineteen people.

Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the largest main display screen in front of them.

On the screen was a real-time visualization of the flow field inside the immersion chamber.

Before, this had been a picture of chaos, filled with complex patterns of vortices, turbulence, and temperature gradients.

But now.

Driven by Li Dong’s Version 2.1 dimension reduction algorithm, that chaos had been deconstructed into sets of colored stripes.

Each stripe represented a basis of a low-dimensional invariant subspace that the algorithm had identified in the spectral space.

All the high-frequency oscillation terms that should have been running wild were silently canceled out by the orthogonality of these bases.

It was as if a hand had reached down into the most fundamental mathematical structure and forced the beast of turbulence into a cage.

Below the main display:

[Exposure Focal Plane Deviation: -0.07 nm]

[Overlay Alignment Error: 0.11 nm]

[Algorithm Feedforward Response Time: 1.8μs]

An alignment error of 0.11 nanometers.

Lin Wei understood the significance of that number. Zhang Mo understood it. All nineteen people in the chamber understood it.

This was the engineering standard of ASML’s latest generation of NXE series EUV lithography machines.

And this was an immersion DUV machine.

They had taken a machine that was, in terms of physical principles, a generation behind, and with a single algorithm, they had brutally dragged its lithography precision up to the level of the next generation.

"This is the seventh time," someone muttered behind Lin Wei.

"The first six were all successful."

"This is the seventh verification test."

"Elder He said that it needs to succeed more than ten times in a row before it can be considered... stably implemented."