> One of the consequences of this axiom is that every subset of the real numbers has a least element according to some ordering.
An even weirder consequence of AC is the Banach-Tarski paradox [1].
Other examples of how mathematicians come up with alternative
perspectives are non-Euclidean geometries that replace the parallel postulate of the common Euclidean geometry, e.g. Lobachevskian [2] and Riemannian geometry [3].