Georg Ferdinand Cantor

This weeks Throwback Thursday shines a light on Georg Ferdinard Cantor

💡In 1863 transferred to the University of Berlin to specialize in physics, philosophy, and mathematics.

💡In 1873 Cantor demonstrated that the rational numbers, though infinite, are countable (or denumerable) because they may be placed in a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers (i.e., the integers, as 1, 2, 3,…).

💡In 1895–97 Cantor fully propounded his view of continuity and the infinite, including infinite ordinals and cardinals, in his best-known work, Beiträge zur Begründung der transfiniten Mengenlehre (published in English under the title Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, 1915).

💡This work contains his conception of transfinite numbers, to which he was led by his demonstration that an infinite set may be placed in a one-to-one correspondence with one of its subsets.

Reference:

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Georg Cantor". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Feb. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Ferdinand-Ludwig-Philipp-Cantor. Accessed 10 March 2022.

Books

Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers by Georg Cantor