Kevin was confused. On rising, he went into the bathroom and looked at a scraggly beard in the mirror. It wasn’t there when he went to bed and he knew he wasn’t Rip Van Winkle since he wasn’t hungry.

He stared into his eyes; they stared back. He began thinking about numbers, lots and lots of numbers. The hot water running in the sink now fogged the glass. He touched the mirror, made a dot and then impulsively began writing digits one after the other to the right. He started another line – a dot and numbers to the edge of the mirror, continuing line after line to the bottom of the glass.

He laughed, running his finger down on a diagonal from the upper left-hand corner to the bottom, mentally changing one digit as he went along. Damn if this doesn’t give me a new number not in the list. I guess I couldn’t have enumerated all the decimals.

He scratched his head, tilted it to the side, and wondered what it all meant, never realizing that he had channeled Georg Cantor’s diagonal process on infinities more than a hundred years later.