Robert Mitchell Burke, Daniel Hooper and James Pascoe have the world in a jug and the cork in their hands. At this very moment they are in Harbin, China, preparing to compete against some of the world’s sharpest young minds in the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, which is like the BCS championship football game for collegiate mathematics and computer science students.

Burke, 19, Hooper, 19, and Pascoe, 20, all are students at the University of North Texas. Burke and Pascoe are veterans of the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, UNT’s estimable program for gifted high school students. Pascoe is a math major; Hooper majors in computer science. Burke is a switch hitter; he’s majoring in both.

The trio, profiled in Monday’s paper by the Record-Chronicle’s Candace Carlisle, won the right to compete in China by taking second place in a three-state regional competition, finishing behind a team from the University of Texas at Austin, a heavy-hitting computer school and a perennial winner in the regional competition. The two Texas teams will compete this week against 101 other collegiate teams from around the world. Each team will be given a computer and a series of complex, real-world problems that they will attempt to solve in the five-hour contest period.

Normally, this is where an expository paragraph would appear explaining the nature of the problems presented at the competition. This newspaper’s Web site presented a few such examples along with the story, and we sent our editorialist to look them up. Two hours later, we found him in the men’s room, breathing rapidly into a small brown paper bag. Needless to say, no such paragraph will appear in this essay. We can only advise our more erudite readers to hie themselves to our Web site and look it up for themselves.

Despite our inability to describe or even comprehend the problems that seem such child’s play for these three young men, we do not hesitate for a moment to extend our congratulations to them, and to UNT, for their magnificent performance. Indeed, the complexity of the information they seem to digest so easily only adds to our amazement and appreciation. It is like watching the Blue Angles fly in close formation; it is as though they are a different species.

Burke, Hooper and Pascoe (they’d make a great law firm if they weren’t too smart by about half) are only the latest evidence of the revenge of the nerds. Since Sputnik scared the pants off the American scientific and educational establishments more than 50 years ago, the kids with the brains have finally been getting their due in the high schools and colleges of America. It has been an uphill battle; our immature preoccupation with looks and athletic prowess still hangs on stubbornly among some of us.

But the results are in, and the geeks won. It isn’t the jocks who will rule the world, or the freaks, or the prom queens. It is the kids in the math, Latin, chess and audio-visual clubs who will be shaping the world in the next generation.

They have always been our future, but now most of us know it.