Decoded by Mai Jia Page A

. . in many, many ways his abilities were truly amazing; ordinary people could not even begin to imagine what he could do. In my opinion, he did not need to waste his time in high school and could have gone straight on to university, but the Headmaster refused – he said that old Mr Rong didn’t want it that way.
The old Mr Rong that this gentleman was talking about was Young Lillie.
    Young Lillie had two reasons for his refusal. First, he was worried about the fact that Jinzhen had spent much of his childhood entirely cut off from other people, so he now needed to learn how to build normal social relations, spending time with other children of his own age, growing up in the ordinary way. Putting him in a situation where he would be entirely surrounded by people many years older than himself would be extremely damaging to a difficult and inward-looking personality. Secondly, he had discovered that Jinzhen would often do stupid things: he would try and conceal from Young Lillie and his teachers that he was trying to prove things that they had already explained to him had been demonstrated conclusively by other people – maybe it was just that he was too clever. Young Lillie thought that someone with no experience of the world, but with such great intelligence, needed to proceed one step at a time, otherwise he might end up wasting his genius on finding out things that other people already knew.
    Later on it became clear that they would have to let him skip whole grades or the teachers simply would not be able to carry on themselves: he was treating his high-school teachers to barrages of obscure questions that they simply could not answer. There was nothing that could be done: Young Lillie had to listen to the advice of the boy’s teachers and let him skip a grade. Having created a precedent, he skipped one grade after the other and so by the time that his fellow classmates from the first year of high school had reached the last, he was already long gone. He passed the university entrance exams with flying colours: 100 per cent in mathematics and seventh place in the entire province. Naturally he ended up in the mathematics department of N University.

6.
    The mathematics department at N University was famous; in fact it was often said to be the cradle of the best mathematicians in the country. About fifteen years ago, a famous author from C City happened to overhear some people making derogatory remarks about his home town. His response was really remarkable. He said, ‘Even if C City was twice as run-down and backward than it is, we would still have the outstanding N University. If N University also started to fail, they would still have a mathematics department that ranks among the best in the world. How dare you make derogatory remarks about us!’
    He meant it as a joke, but the fact is that the mathematics department of N University has always been very highly regarded.
    On Jinzhen’s first day at university, Young Lillie gave him a diary. He had written a message on the fly-leaf, which ran as follows:
    If you want to become a mathematician, you have come to the very best place in the country to foster your talents. If you do not want to become a mathematician, then you do not need to attend this university, for you already know enough mathematics to last you for the rest of your life.
    Perhaps there was no one more aware than Young Lillie of the rare and amazing mathematical genius concealed beneath Jinzhen’s impassive exterior. Because of that, there was no one who hoped that Jinzhen would become a mathematician more than Young Lillie. As you will have realized, the note that he wrote in the front of Jinzhen’s diary is proof of that. Young Lillie was quite sure that in the future there would be a long train of other people who followed in his footsteps in realizing that Jinzhen had a remarkable genius for mathematics. However, at the same time he was worried that if that recognition came now it would be