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Georg Cantor Biography

Georg Cantor

(Georg Ferdinand Cantor; Saint Petersburg, 1845-Halle, Germany, 1918) German mathematician of Russian origin.The young Cantor remained in Russia with his family for eleven years, until the delicate health of his father forced them to move to Germany.In 1862 he entered the University of Zurich, but after the death of his father, a year later, he moved to the University of Berlin, where he studied mathematics (he had as professors Ernst Kummer, Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker, among others), physics and philosophy.He received his doctorate in 1867 and began working as an adjunct professor at the University of Halle.

Georg Cantor

Starting from the ideas contained in a posthumous work by Bernhard Bolzano, Paradoxes of the infinite (1851 ), in 1874 he published his first work on set theory.Between 1874 and 1897, he showed that the set of integers had the same number of elements as the set of even numbers, and that the number of points in a segment is equal to the number of points in an infinite line, in a plane and from any space.That is, all infinite sets are "the same size."

Cantor considered these sets as complete entities with a number of complete infinite elements.He called these complete infinite numbers "transfinite numbers" and articulated complete transfinite arithmetic.For this work he was promoted to professor in 1879.

However, the concept of infinity in mathematics had been taboo until then, and for this he made some enemies, especially Leopold Kronecker, who did everything he could to ruin his career.Stuck in a third-class educational institution, deprived of recognition for his work and constantly attacked by Kronecker, he suffered his first nervous breakdown in 1884.

His theories were only recognized in the early 20th century, and in 1904 he was awarded a medal from the Royal Society of London and admitted to both the London Mathematical Society and the Göttingen Science Society.At present he is considered the father of set theory, a starting point of exceptional importance in the development of modern mathematics.He died in a mental institution.

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