Georg Cantor

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

philosophy and physics. There he studied under
some of the greatest mathematicians of the day including Kronecker and
Weierstrass. After receiving his doctorate in 1867 from Berlin, he was unable to
find good employment and was forced to accept a position as an unpaid lecturer
and later as an assistant professor at the University of Halle in1869. In 1874,
he married and had six children. It was in that same year of 1874 that Cantor
published his first paper on the theory of sets. While studying a problem in
analysis, he had dug deeply into its foundations, especially sets and infinite
sets. What he found baffled him. In a series of papers from 1874 to 1897, he was
able to prove that the set of integers had an equal number of members as the set
of even numbers, squares, cubes, and roots to equations; that the number of
points in a line segment is equal to the number of points in an infinite line, a
plane and all mathematical space; and that the number of transcendental ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

he did all he could to
suppress Cantor's ideas and ruin his life. Among other things, he delayed or
suppressed completely Cantor's and his followers' publications, belittled his
ideas in front of his students and blocked Cantor's life ambition of gaining a
position at the prestigious University of Berlin. Not all mathematicians were
hostile to Cantor's ideas. Some greats such as Karl Weierstrass, and long-time
friend Richard Dedekind supported his ideas and attacked Kronecker's actions.
However, it was not enough. Cantor simply could not handle it. Stuck in a third-
rate institution, stripped of well-deserved recognition for his work and under
constant attack by Kronecker, he suffered ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: