In June 1913, sailors of the Russian Imperial Navy invaded the Monastery of Agios Panteleimon on Mount Athos and expelled the Russian monks who were settled there and engaged in the heretical practice of Name Worship. Exiled to remote areas of Russia, these monks turned to illegality and came into contact with intellectuals who joined their mystical movement, drawing inspiration from it for one of the greatest mathematical innovations of the 20th century: the resolution of the puzzle regarding the nature of infinity. They thus surpassed the parallel, more rationalistic efforts of certain French mathematicians and, driven by their religious fervor, arrived at the descriptive theory of sets.

"An extraordinary convergence of mathematical creation and mystical practices lies at the heart of this impressive study on the emergence of set theory in early 20th-century Russia. The stark contrast with mathematical developments in France illuminates the history, and the book is electrified by the portraits of the great mathematicians involved: the tragic, the unlucky, the superfluous, the truly remarkable. The authors offer a concise, skillful, serious, and accessible description of the Infinite for non-mathematicians... an astonishing piece of mathematical history."
Barry Mazur, Harvard University

"At the end of the 19th century, three young French mathematicians - Émile Borel, René Baire, and Henri Lebesgue - relied on the work of Georg Cantor to conceive a new theory of functions that, in a few years, revolutionized mathematical analysis. When their work was met with skepticism, they began to doubt it themselves and abandoned further research. In Russia, under the leadership of Dimitri Egorov, a group of mathematicians in Moscow took up the torch. Motivated by a mystical tradition known as Name Worship, they found the creative impulse to name the new objects of French function theory. And thus, they changed the face of the mathematical world."
Bernard Bru, Emeritus Professor, University of Paris V