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Chapter 333: Chapter 286: They Are Gambling

Though the voice was faint, it still had some strength behind it.

Li Dong heard it and breathed a small sigh of relief.

He called out in response.

”Teacher Zhang, I can come this afternoon.”

”I don’t have class this afternoon.”

The room went quiet for a moment.

Then, an old woman slowly emerged from the inner room.

Her hair was still the same salt-and-pepper gray.

She had gotten noticeably thinner since the last time Li Dong had seen her.

But her eyes were still bright.

”Heh.”

”You rascal, you’re here again.”

Her eyes flicked to the bag of apples in Li Dong’s hand.

”And you even brought me something.”

”It seems doting on you wasn’t a waste, was it?”

Li Dong said, his tone gently chiding.

”Teacher Zhang, you’re sick and you didn’t even tell me.”

”If I hadn’t run into Qi Yu today, I never would have known you were sick.”

The old woman sighed dismissively.

”What’s there to tell?”

”It’s the same old problem.”

”It’s flared up so many times. It’s not something that can be cured.”

Li Dong set the apples on a small cabinet, then walked over and helped her sit down on the sofa.

”What do you mean, it can’t be cured?”

”Technology is advancing every day. Who knows, maybe tomorrow they’ll invent something that’ll just dig that root right out of you.”

His choice of words—”dig that root right out”—made the old woman laugh.

”Alright, then.”

”I’ll be waiting for it.”

After she finished laughing, she waved to Qi Yu.

”Xiaoyu.”

”You should get to your class.”

”This rascal can keep me company this afternoon.”

”He doesn’t have classes anyway.”

Li Dong chimed in.

”That’s right, Qi Yu. You should get going.”

”I’ll stay and have a good chat with Teacher Zhang.”

Qi Yu looked at Li Dong, then at the old woman.

”Alright, then.”

”Teacher, if you feel unwell at all, remember to call me.”

The old woman nodded.

”Go on, go on.”

After Qi Yu left, only Li Dong and the old woman remained in the room.

She looked at Li Dong and asked.

”So, how’s it going with the project team?”

Li Dong sat down on a wooden chair across from the sofa.

He thought for a moment.

”Well, we’re making pretty good progress.”

”It just seems like someone’s gotten ahead of us.”

The old woman calmly picked up a glass of water from the coffee table and took a sip.

”Back when we were doing this kind of work...”

”People were always ahead of us.”

She smiled and patted Li Dong’s hand.

”So, don’t let it get to you.”

”Having someone ahead of us gives us someone to chase, and eventually, to surpass.”

”If there’s no one out in front, who are you even racing against?”

As Li Dong listened, the tension that announcement had created in him began to ease.

The old woman had a way with words.

Li Dong smiled.

”Don’t you worry, Teacher Zhang.”

”Catching up to them will be a piece of cake.”

She was amused by his response.

”You rascal, still as brazen as ever.”

”You don’t act like a mathematician. You’re more like that gang of troublemakers we had back in our Coordination Chemistry days.”

Li Dong laughed too.

”Teacher Zhang, it’s not being brazen.”

”It’s called being confident.”

The old woman smiled and nodded.

”Alright, alright.”

”You’re confident.”

The two of them continued to chat idly for a while.

The old woman reminisced about her past: how she had transferred from an old engineering university up north to Yan University, how she had first stepped into the field of Coordination Chemistry, and how she and her advisor had toiled away for nearly ten years in a tiny lab, less than twenty square meters in size.

Li Dong listened intently.

When she started to feel tired from talking, she rubbed her temples.

”Kid, I’m going to lie down for a bit.”

Li Dong quickly stood up, helped her into the inner room, watched her lie down on the bed, and draped a blanket over her.

The old woman squinted and waved him away.

”Alright, alright. Off with you now, kid.”

”I need to get some rest.”

Li Dong gently pulled the bedroom door shut and retreated to the living room.

...

The living room was silent. Li Dong sat down at a desk.

His thoughts circled around and around.

’A lab in the late fifties and early sixties.’

’No proper fume hoods, inhaling organic solvents day after day.’

’Her first heart attack at fifty-two.’

’A large area of myocardial fibrosis.’

’Ischemia-reperfusion injury.’

’If Professor Wu Kai’s team really manages to create that single-atom iron nanozyme...’

’The progression of her fibrosis might just stop.’

’She could teach for another ten years.’

Li Dong took a deep breath.

He fished a stack of scratch paper out of his bag and pulled a pencil from a pen holder.

They were all right there on the old woman’s desk; clearly, she often sat in the living room doing calculations herself.

He spread the scratch paper out on the desk.

He was going to tackle the mathematical inversion again.

He had thought he’d already delved into it as far as he could, and he truly believed it was a dead end.

But now...

The German team, following this very path of mathematical inversion, had managed to push through the section his intuition told him was a dead end.

Li Dong had to dive in and see for himself.

He lowered his head.

The first step was to work backward from the incomplete set of tunneling spectra to find the kernel of the measurement operator.

In essence, it was an ill-posed inverse problem.

A tiny perturbation in the input could be amplified astronomically in the output.

Classic Gikhmanov regularization involved selecting a prior norm to suppress this amplification, forcing the solution into a stable subspace.

Li Dong first worked his way through the Gikhmanov method from the beginning.

He worked his way to the exact line where he had gotten stuck before...

He closed his eyes, taking a silent, mental breath.

He opened his eyes and continued pushing forward.

The German team had written one sentence in their extended abstract:

”Combining a variational scheme that acts on the third coordination shell to fully reuse residual phase information...”