Chasing Light in the Sea

In the university cafeteria late at night, first-year graduate student Mao Jingyao was fiddling with something on the table with chopsticks. Associate Professor Tao Qianyu, who was passing by, stopped - it was not a random scribbling, but a sketch of a pattern mapped on a basic domain. In Mao Jingyao's brain, mathematical formulas were like an endless torrent. He could "see" series unfolding in the void, and hear identities whispered deep in his consciousness. This is not a superpower, but the price of a brain that is extremely sensitive to mathematical structures - he can't stop, he can't sleep, he can't live like an ordinary person. From the draft of the paper that was thrown into the trash can by his former tutor, to solving the centuries-old mathematical problems left by Ramanujan; from doing calculations alone late at night, to gathering a group of partners with different personalities - the cold-faced and rigorous tutor Tao Qianyu, the fiery and straightforward senior sister Pang Zhixuan, and the school girl Shi Yazhen who compiled 3,000 formula indexes in the basement... When the whiteboard was filled with circles of different colors, Mao Jingyao discovered that mathematics has never been a one-person battle. From the unified generalization of the congruence of split functions, to the mathematical prediction of protein folding paths, to the security parameters of quantum cryptography-a series on the cafeteria table, it eventually grew into a universal mathematical framework that transformed many fields. And those never-ending torrent of inspiration are pushing him towards the same fate as Ramanujan: the brighter the flame of genius burns, the less time is left for him. [No system, no rebirth, no golden fingers, no emotional lines between men and women. There are only formulas on paper, circles on the whiteboard, the light that refuses to be turned off late at night, and a simple and almost paranoid belief - keep on counting.