I remember the exact moment I realized the universe was held together by duct tape and spoons masquerading as mathematics. It was Tuesday. Or was it Thursday? That’s not important. What matters is that while the world’s mathematicians blissfully tap-danced atop numbers, smug in their certainty that sets did what sets are supposed to do—never questioning that maybe, just maybe, infinity is the world’s most elaborate cosmic prank—there was, in the shadows, a congregation of set theorists who refused to leave the party after everyone else had gone home. Yes, the Descriptive Set Theorists, the crypt keepers of Mathland, have long obsessed over the infinite—treating “infinity” not as a number but as a sarcastic suggestion. Like those people who show up to vegan brunches with steak. With them, every number is an ouroboros. Every set is a suitcase packed by a five-year-old: things inside things inside things, and you’re not allowed to peek. To everyone else, infinity is a theoretical construct, sort of like the calories in celery or a unicorn on the New York subway. You know it’s out there, maybe. It never actually touches your day. But for these mathematicians, infinity is a houseguest who won’t leave, rearranged your furniture, and now lives rent-free in your attic. Now—pause everything—2023. The comet is in the sky and the four horsemen are watching cable news. Enter Anton Bernshteyn, bearer of the flaming calculator. Instead of minding his own business, he decides to build a bridge. Not a regular bridge. No, a mindbridge between the haunted woods of descriptive set theory and the screaming server rooms of computer science. It’s like discovering your favorite heavy metal band is collaborating with the cast of High School Musical. Or, more apropos, finding out that Microsoft Excel speaks fluent Infinity. He proved something that made everyone sit up in their respective corners of the void: every problem about particular infinite sets can double as a problem about computer networks trying desperately not to crash. It’s the mathematical equivalent of realizing your dreams and nightmares are just Google Docs fighting over the Wi-Fi. Set theorists usually wield logic like wizards with dice, while computer scientists jab at algorithms as if trying to get a toaster to recite Shakespeare. They might as well be sending messages in tequila bottles across oceans of misunderstanding. Yet somehow, Bernshteyn declared, “Actually, we’re all playing Dungeons & Dragons, and the campaign is called ‘Infinity’s Revenge: The Server Room Reckoning.’” This has sent both camps into a feedback loop of existential crisis and collaboration. Now that you can walk from Cantor’s Infinite Carnival directly into Silicon Valley’s code mill, mathematicians and computer scientists are flocking back and forth over the bridge—or, depending on how you see it, the rickety rope ladder above the chasm of madness. If that wasn’t enough, set theorists—ancient keepers of the “infinite nesting doll conundrum”—are now borrowing the fast-twitch logic of computer scientists to ask “What if infinity had a user interface?” Suddenly, their proofs go from dusty scrolls to quantum chatbots with customer service scripts. Meanwhile, back in a university office stacked with coffee mugs and despair, Bernshteyn recounts the tale: lured by rumors that descriptive set theory was the mathematical equivalent of Blockbuster after Netflix, he fell under the spell of a professor who insisted that logic is the gorilla glue holding all math together. And glue, he realized, is nothing without the glittering chaos of infinity and the spaghetti code that is modern computation. So now we stand at the precipice: a universe where the lines between infinite abstraction and digital circuits have blurred, and every night the ghosts of Cantor and Alan Turing play chess with rules that change if you blink. Welcome to the new math. Stock up on canned food and learn to love paradoxes. The end is nigh. Or maybe it’s just beginning. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to update my apocalypse spreadsheet before it becomes self-aware.