Jan Liseiwicz’s discovery of Rong Jinzhen’s mathematical ability turns a quiet student in the front row into the focus of a professor’s teaching and private attention. Over a little more than a week, Rong Jinzhen answers two successive problems set in class, and Jan Liseiwicz recognizes in his written work not only correctness but a strikingly independent way of reasoning. The recognition is immediate enough to change how the professor teaches him, but it does not settle what kind of education the young mathematician needs.

The student in the front row

Rong Jinzhen was sixteen and short enough to sit in the very front row of Jan Liseiwicz’s class. From there, he could see the professor’s pale blue eyes clearly as Jan Liseiwicz lectured with an intensity that made abstract mathematical notation seem charged with feeling. The professor waved his arms, raised his voice, and paced as he spoke; at the end of the first class, he left without another word. In that final moment, his attention fell on the thin young man bent over a sheet of calculations, so absorbed that he seemed to be working an examination rather than attending a lecture.

Two days later, Jan Liseiwicz asked the class whether anyone called Rong Jinzhen was present. When Rong Jinzhen raised his hand, the professor recognized him as the student he had noticed and showed him several sheets of paper, asking whether he had put them under his door. Rong Jinzhen acknowledged that he had. Jan Liseiwicz then told him that he need not attend class for the rest of the term. The announcement caused an uproar, but the professor waited with a smile until the room quieted. He rewrote the problem on the blackboard and made Rong Jinzhen’s solution the subject of the day’s lesson.

A solution becomes a lesson

Jan Liseiwicz did not merely display the answer. He wrote Rong Jinzhen’s solution out in full and explained its steps, then worked through three alternative methods. The comparison let the class see how different routes could reach the same result; the solution became a way to teach the subject, rather than an extracurricular curiosity. At the end, the professor set another question for the students to answer before the next class, expecting that a solution would be highly unlikely.

Rong Jinzhen solved that second problem at once. The gap between Jan Liseiwicz’s expectation and the result sharpened the professor’s sense that he was dealing with an unusual ability: the quiet boy had made possible what seemed almost impossible by ordinary calculation. Jan Liseiwicz immediately set a third question, this time addressing Rong Jinzhen directly and saying that, if he solved it too, he would receive a personal problem. That problem would form the basis of his graduation thesis.

The third challenge did not yield as quickly. By the next class Rong Jinzhen had no solution to present, and he attended three of Jan Liseiwicz’s classes in all, over just more than a week. At the end of the third, Jan Liseiwicz told him that he had already thought of a thesis question; Rong Jinzhen could collect it once he had finished the problem already in hand. The exchange gives the recognition a concrete measure: the professor moved from testing the student with class problems to imagining advanced independent work, without suggesting that every difficulty would disappear immediately.

The proof behind the praise

The professor’s assessment grew from close inspection of Rong Jinzhen’s written work. After receiving the pages under his door, Jan Liseiwicz saw that the answer was correct. He started toward the door with the impulse to call Rong Jinzhen back, hesitated, and returned to the sofa to read the calculations from the beginning. Only after studying them carefully did he hurry to the window, spot Rong Jinzhen walking away, and call him back upstairs.

Jan Liseiwicz initially asked whether Rong Jinzhen had worked out the answers alone or received help. Rong Jinzhen drew himself up and insisted that he had done the work himself. The professor’s suspicion did not last: after Rong Jinzhen left, Jan Liseiwicz reviewed the papers and dismissed the possibility that someone else had supplied the solutions. The proofs showed a method he found unusual and impressive, at once naïve in its means and clear in its grasp of logic. The unusualness was not a lack of rigor; it was evidence that Rong Jinzhen had reached the result by constructing his own path.

When Jan Liseiwicz visited Young Lillie that evening, he tried to describe this method through an image of a dark maze. A traveler without familiar tools for illumination would have to use mirrors to direct a weak beam of sunlight through the tunnels, placing another mirror at each bend and somehow selecting the right branch at every fork. The image conveyed both the limitations under which Rong Jinzhen worked and the remarkable fact that he continued to find his way. Jan Liseiwicz’s praise was exceptional: in almost a decade as colleagues, Young Lillie had never heard him speak so admiringly of anyone’s mathematical ability.

Recognition and disagreement

Young Lillie welcomed the confirmation. He had been the first to recognize Rong Jinzhen’s mathematical promise, and Jan Liseiwicz’s judgment supplied independent weight from a professor not known for readily acknowledging another person’s ability. Their conversation grew warmer as they agreed on the significance of the work. Yet agreement about talent quickly exposed a difference over what should follow from it.

Jan Liseiwicz believed Rong Jinzhen already knew enough of the basics to move directly toward his graduation thesis. Young Lillie disagreed. He considered the young man’s isolation and lack of experience with peers dangerous weaknesses, not incidental details that extraordinary academic progress could simply erase. Rong Jinzhen preferred solitude, treated others with unusual coldness, and had spent little time interacting with students his own age. Young Lillie was trying to repair the effects of that upbringing by encouraging more contact with children; he feared that surrounding Rong Jinzhen with still more adults could worsen his alienation. The discovery therefore culminates not in a simple celebration of genius but in a practical dispute: how to cultivate an exceptional mind without neglecting the young person whose life and development would have to sustain it.