Essay Database

I. Georg Cantor Georg Cantor founded set theory and introduced the concept of infinite numbers with his discovery of cardinal numbers. He also advanced the study of trigonometric series and was the first to prove the nondenumerability of the real numbers. Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on March 3, 1845. His family stayed in Russia for eleven years until the father's sickly health forced them to move to the more acceptable …

…work was so revolutionary that Kronecker's argument that it 'went too far' seemed plausible. Kronecker was a member of the editorial boards of the important mathematical journals of his day, and he used his influence to prevent much of Cantor's work from being published in his lifetime. Cantor did not know at the time of his death, that not only would his ideas prevail, but that they would shape the course of 20th century mathematics.