Who was Georg Cantor?
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was a German mathematician. He was born on 3 March 1845. He formulated set theory, which is now considered as the fundamental theory in mathematics. He died on January 6, 1918.
When did the Cantor-Dedekind correspondence end?
In 1882, the mathematical correspondence between Cantor and Dedekind came to an end, apparently as a result of Dedekind’s declining the chair at Halle. Cantor also began another important correspondence, with Gösta Mittag-Leffler in Sweden, and soon began to publish in Mittag-Leffler’s journal Acta Mathematica.
What happened to Cantor’s father?
However, in 1862 Cantor had sought his father’s permission to study mathematics at university and he was overjoyed when eventually his father consented. His studies at Zürich, however, were cut short by the death of his father in June 1863.
How did Cantor contribute to the development of set theory?
Georg Cantor was the first to fully address such an abstract concept, and he did it by developing set theory, which led him to the surprising conclusion that there are infinities of different sizes.
Why did Cantor’s father move to Germany?
Cantor’s father had been a member of the Saint Petersburg stock exchange; when he became ill, the family moved to Germany in 1856, first to Wiesbaden, then to Frankfurt, seeking milder winters than those of Saint Petersburg.
Were Georg Cantor’s grandparents Sephardic?
In a letter written by Georg Cantor to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13 Correspondence, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306), Cantor states that his paternal grandparents were members of the Sephardic Jewish community of Copenhagen.
What is an example of a set for Cantor?
For Cantor, sets are collections of objects that can have finite or infinite elements. For example, the set of fingers of a hand has finite elements ( {thumb, index, middle, ring and pinky}), while the set of natural numbers (N = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…}) has infinite elements.