Then Dr. Sullivan stood up, walked to the front of the auditorium, picked up a clean pair of reading glasses from her bag, and put them on. She walked the length of the board: she read line one, then line two, then line three, then line four, then line five. She went back to line one and read it again.
Twenty seconds passed, then thirty. The room held its breath.
Sullivan turned to the audience. "The solution is correct."
The silence held for three more seconds. Then Sullivan turned to Walsh. Her voice did not rise, but it carried to every row in the room:
"Professor Walsh, the technique Miss Tate just used to solve your equation was published three months ago in the Journal of Number Theory by W. Tate." She paused. "This is her own paper."
Walsh said nothing.
"You wrote a problem on this board in front of two hundred witnesses that you claimed had resisted MIT for a decade. You then asked one of your own undergraduates to solve it, and she did—in thirty seconds, using her own published work. The same work that was on your desk eighteen months ago when you signed her thesis with the note: Will not generalize."
Sullivan removed her glasses and held them in her hand.
"She did not memorize her result. She invented it. And she just used it to solve a problem you have spent three years claiming was unsolvable."
Walsh's mouth opened; no sound came out. His right hand was on the armrest; it had gone white.
Whitney walked to the lectern. She did not pick up the microphone; she did not need to, as the room had not breathed in a full minute. She set the chalk down on the tray next to the stopwatch.
She looked at Walsh. "Professor."
Walsh looked up slowly.
"You said even MIT can't solve this equation." She paused. "You forgot something."