The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
All of modern mathematics is built on the foundation of set theory, the study of how to organize abstract collections of objects. But in general, research mathematicians don’t need to think about it when they’re solving their problems. They can take it for granted that sets behave the way they’d expect, and carry on with their work.
Descriptive set theorists are an exception. This small community of mathematicians never stopped studying the fundamental nature of sets—particularly the strange infinite ones that other mathematicians ignore.
Their field just got a lot less lonely. In 2023, a mathematician named
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