Late night, flora.
The time is when most children have gone to bed and are ready for a bedtime story.
There were already many people on the winding stone road. There were camphor trees and low shrubs planted along the roadside, and mint and geranium in the lower places. The night breeze blew gently, and the air was faintly filled with the fresh aroma of plants.
The street lamps cast a soft glow. Old Lin led the 12 children behind him and took a walk on this peaceful and tranquil path.
Apart from……
"Master, there is no moon. How can the night be so beautiful?" Lin Chaoxi looked around for a long time and finally asked.
"Yes, there is no moon."
“There are no stars either.”
“It’s so dark.”
The children were talking at once, and the adult standing in the front stopped walking awkwardly, instantly breaking the quiet and peaceful atmosphere.
Lao Lin coughed several times: "With the moon in my heart, there is the moon everywhere, such a beautiful day..."
"You should talk about mathematics." Huajuan interrupted him.
"What's so good about mathematics..." Old Lin's enthusiasm for poetry recitation was dampened again. "What do you want to hear?"
“Application questions!”
"Yes, the test is on Monday. Teacher, can you please tell me about the application questions? Do you have any tips?"
Lao Lin smiled, touched the child's head, and said unwillingly, "You want to learn how to do word problems so badly? That's great. Let's talk about math, shall we?"
"Ah~" the children drawled, "That's super boring."
"Yes, especially prime numbers and prime factorization." said a boy from Group 6.
Hearing this, Lao Lin's eyes lit up: "Wow, you know so much!" He turned around and pointed to the one who spoke the loudest: "Let's talk about what a prime number is."
"A natural number greater than 1 that cannot be divided by other natural numbers except 1 and itself is called a prime number." The little boy recited it very fluently.
Recalling a scene that happened in front of the wooden door under the starry sky, Lin Chaoxi couldn't help but worry for the little boy.
"Okay, so what are natural numbers?"
Another kid answered quickly: "It's 123456789 and lots of integers after it!"
Lao Lin: "How much is a lot?"
"Infinite!" The child raised his hands with his arms open, as if he was about to fly under the night sky.
Time and space seemed to have stopped for a brief moment. Lao Lin stood under the street light, with insects dancing above his head. He was smiling, and there were faint lines at the corners of his eyes, but they seemed to be glowing.
It was also at that moment that Lin Chaoxi knew very clearly that Old Lin was very happy. He preferred being with the children to spending his days in the park, and he also preferred the feeling of being close to mathematics again.
Lao Lin laughed for a while before he spoke slowly: "At the end of the 19th century, Italian mathematician Peano proposed five axioms to define natural numbers. I will recite them to you. First, ..."
One, two, three, four, five, he recited the five axioms very handsomely. All the children thought they were listening to a foreign language and had no idea what he was saying.
Seeing these completely confused faces, Lao Lin asked: "Do you know what natural numbers are?"
"I don't know!" The children shook their heads in unison.
"Because there's a world of difference between memorizing those five words and knowing what they are."
The students nodded vigorously: "So memorizing is not important!"
Lao Lin smiled: "On the contrary, my point is that understanding is more important. So, now let's take a good look at what natural numbers are..."
Lao Lin pointed to the trees on the roadside and began to explain to the children the most basic thing: natural numbers.
——
The path in the botanical garden is long, but it is also short. Just walk from the beginning to the end, and the small white building standing at the foot of the mountain is already within reach.
A group of them stood in the middle of the road, looking at the dormitory building in the distance, but no one wanted to leave.
"Go back to bed early." Lao Lin broke the silence and turned to leave.
"I don't want to sleep yet!"
"You haven't finished yet. I won't have time to learn tomorrow!"
"The exam is coming up soon, and we haven't done any of the questions yet. You were supposed to explain the questions to us."
The students began to whisper again, and the sound of 12 children chattering together was very penetrating in the night.
Lao Lin didn't care about them and just left.
At this time, someone bold enough to say, "Let's check the room first before running out?"
"Yeah, there's no class tomorrow anyway, and Auntie won't come again after coming once. The last time I was found was because my flashlight fell out..."
Lin Chaoxi looked in the direction of the voice and found that it was Lu Zhihao who said it. She took a breath and said, "Old Lu, your idea is too dangerous."
It was obviously you who was caught by Vice Principal Zhang last time and was severely reprimanded.
But the kids didn't care. After discussing for a while, they decided that their school hours were too tight and they wouldn't be able to finish their studies before the midterm exams at the current pace. So running out at night was a feasible idea.
"Teacher, is this okay?"
I don't know who shouted, or who started the charge, but Lao Lin's back as he was walking down the slope froze, and he was soon surrounded by a group of students. Some grabbed his clothes, some hugged his arms, and they wouldn't let him go.
Lin Zhaoxi retracted her gaze and found that only she and Pei Zhi were still standing there. They looked at each other and smiled at the same time.
——
"I'll just say one thing." Lao Lin sat cross-legged on the mat, "If you get caught, don't give me away."
There was a light smoke in the room and the air smelled like mosquito coils, but when it was quiet, you could still hear the chirping of insects and frogs outside.
At night, they quietly came to Lao Lin's temporary dormitory.
The Oasis Base doesn't have any other advantages except that there are a lot of houses, so the dormitory for temporary workers like Lao Lin is actually a rare single room.
The place was big, but there weren't enough tables and chairs, so the diligent little girls mopped the floor and they sat on the floor tiles.
Lao Lin sat next to the mosquito coil, making him look like an immortal.
"I remember that you all don't like to do problems related to number theory?"
"Yes, I just think it's useless to learn this!" the student said, and began to flip through the book. "For example, this question - there are 30 2-cent coins and 8 5-cent coins. There are 49 different denominations within 50 cents. Which denominations cannot be made up of the above 38 coins?"
"Indeed." Lao Lin smiled: "Then what's not boring?"
"I...I think the word problems are kind of interesting!"
Lao Lin laughed: "I think it's boring to keep chickens and rabbits in the same cage. Do you really count chickens and rabbits when you buy groceries?"
The students had never seen a teacher say that what he taught was boring, and they were choked and speechless.
"There will definitely be many people who tell you that mathematics is very beautiful and has a wide range of applications in life, but when we look down, we find that they are all very boring questions."
"Yes, yes!" the children echoed.
Lao Lin: "So, the adults are all lying to you. Don't believe them."
Lin Zhaoxi: “…”
"Again, most mathematicians study mathematics because..."
"They are very boring~" Hanamaki answered cooperatively.
"Yes, but if there weren't so many boring people, our world today would definitely not be what you see." Lao Lin sat up straight, looking energetic.
He said, "Just now you mentioned prime numbers. The study of prime numbers can be traced back to more than 2,000 years ago or even earlier. You have also done a lot of questions related to prime numbers and memorized the definition by heart. But as to what prime numbers are and why we should study them, we still feel confused, right?"
"Yeah, yeah."
The children are quickly becoming Lao Lin's yes-men.
"Do you have to know the meaning of it to stop being bored?" Lao Lin said in an intriguing tone. "I can roughly explain the necessity of prime number research in two categories. Do you want to hear it?"
“Yes, yes!”
"Primes are building blocks all numbers," said Lao Lin. "This is one of the theories."
The children looked up at him, like little staring goldfish, completely confused.
"Ah, teacher, what did you say?" Someone finally responded.
"Teacher, can you speak Chinese?" Chen Chengcheng asked weakly.
Lao Lin: "Children, it is very important to learn a foreign language well."
Lin Zhaoxi: ...
Lao Lin: "Here, let me roughly translate it. Prime numbers are the basic elements that make up natural numbers. For example, scientists are always exploring what makes up matter, molecules, atoms, and what atoms are further divided into?"
"What is it?"
Lao Lin: "I don't know either. Some say it's 'string'?"
"Are prime numbers to natural numbers what strings are to matter?" asked a quick-witted child.
"Because prime numbers are indivisible except 1 and themselves, they are extremely important to natural numbers!" An Beibei also shouted.
"I know, blocks means bricks. What you just said is that prime numbers are the bricks that make up natural numbers!" said another child.
The smile of surprise on Lao Lin's face grew wider and wider: "Your English is really good, kid!"
The children expressed their opinions one by one, and the dormitory was filled with voices. Lao Lin just listened patiently, nodding in approval of each child's answer without criticizing. They discussed this topic alone for half an hour.
Starting with the most obvious prime number problem, Lao Lin explained to the children in a simple and clear way different types of prime number problems, and then expanded from prime numbers to number theory. It seemed that because of the discussion just now, number theory, a boring thing in pure mathematics, suddenly became important.
After a while, one of the kids suddenly thought of something and asked, "What about the second meaning of prime numbers?"
Lao Lin smiled, as if he had been waiting for them to ask this question for a long time: "Mathematicians have been boringly studying prime numbers for more than two thousand years. You can imagine that for more than two thousand years, some particularly bored mathematicians have been working from dawn to dusk to find the distribution pattern of prime numbers and calculate the number of prime numbers within a certain range..."
"How long will that take?"
"I don't know how long they have been calculating, maybe a lifetime for some people." Lao Lin laughed, "In short, they are obsessed with these boring numbers. For more than 2,000 years, mathematicians have been doing this kind of thing that seems to have no practical use at all."
The children all fell silent and looked at Lao Lin quietly.
"You ask what the point is. I don't think they know what the point is. They are just having fun."
"After a life of poverty, I wanted to have some fun." Lao Lin smiled. "It was not until more than 2,000 years later, when mankind entered the information age, that prime numbers began to show their usefulness. They were used in public key cryptographic systems, and they determine today's information security."
Lao Lin stopped talking here. The children nodded, not quite understanding.
Lin Chaoxi looked at her father's smiling face while waiting. She actually knew that what Old Lin wanted to say was - there is no need to look for so many meanings, mathematical research itself is the meaning.
But he didn't say that. He probably hoped that the children could experience this for themselves.
Plant a small seed in your heart, and maybe one day it will grow into a towering tree.
This is probably what Lao Lin hopes.
——
The study that day went on until very late, or even very early.
When they secretly left Lao Lin's dormitory, the children were not tired at all. They walked together quietly at night, chatting casually, talking about questions they didn't know, what they learned today, and where they would go tomorrow...
Lao Lin followed at the end, with Lin Chaoxi walking beside him.
Lin Zhaoxi looked up at the dark night sky. The air was moist and had the fragrance of flowers and plants, hmm... the fragrance of knowledge. She found a very literary metaphor.
"Girl." Suddenly, Lao Lin called her, "Are you going home tomorrow?" Lao Lin asked.
Lin Zhaoxi turned his head suddenly and looked up at Lao Lin in a daze: "Big... probably not coming back..."
"That's good." Lao Lin turned to Pei Zhi and asked, "What about you, kid?"
Pei Zhi turned his head to look at him and said bluntly: "No reply."
"That's good," Lao Lin smiled, "I'll take you guys on a picnic tomorrow?"
Lin Chaoxi was flattered and nodded vigorously. She turned to look at Pei Zhi happily, but found that Pei Zhi was looking at her thoughtfully.
As if to say, can you really do it tomorrow?
Lin Zhaoxi suddenly remembered the phone call. The Dean's mother said... on the weekend... Professor Shen and his wife...
After asking, Lao Lin put his hands behind his back and walked away, pretending nothing had happened.
Lin Chaoxi's scalp was tingling. What if Professor Shen and his wife brought little Lin Aimin to see her tomorrow?
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com