Biography Of Georg Ferdinard Ludwig Philipp Cantor

Born March 3, 1845, Georg Ferdinard Ludwig Philipp Cantor, begin his life in the northwestern corner named Russia within the well-populated merchant colony of Saint Petersburg. The oldest of six children, Cantor was a great violinist. Taking after his grandfather, Franz Bohm (1788-1846) who played in a Russian imperial orchestra. Opposite from his grandfather was Cantor’s father a member among the Saint Petersburg stock exchange, and he was an ace at that, for that the money Cantor’s father would leave Cantor a very large inheritance which will fund his research and education thru out his lifetime. During the year 1856 Cantor just eleven years old will watch his father become ill and uproot the family first traveling Wiesbaden, Germany, but later moving more east an settling within Frankfurt, Germany withdrawing themselves from the winters harshness. Cantor would soon graduate in 1860 achieving distinction from the Realschule Darmstadt, the city state of Hesse in Germany; with his skills in mathematics and trigonometry being well above average. In 1862, he would continue his education by enrolling into the Swiss Federal Polytechnic; which is a university that studies science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Sadly, in 1863 Cantor’s father would pass away, leaving him with a substantial inheritance, allowing him to transfer to the University of Berlin, where Cantor would attend lectures from his heroes which he admired Leopold Kronecker, Karl Weierstrass, and Ernst Kummer. He would round off his studies in the summer of 1866 at the University of Gottingen, but still, always just a stone’s throw from an education institution Cantor would start teaching at an all girls’ school in Berlin. As he worked on his dissertation, “De aequationibus secondi gradis indeterminatis” (Dauben 30) which talked of set theory …show more content…
Pure set theory deals exclusively with sets, so the only sets under consideration are those whose members are also sets. The theory of the hereditarily-finitesets, namely those finite sets whose elements are also finite sets, the elements of which are also finite, and so on, is formally equivalent to arithmetic. So, the essence of set theory is the study of infinite sets, and therefore it can be defined as the mathematical theory of the actual—as opposed to potential—infinite.” …show more content…
Two people that spoke out against his teaching were his idols Henri Poincare and Leopold Kronecker. With Kronecker even go as far as to public opposition and personal attacks, saying that Cantor was “renegade” along with becoming a “corrupter of youth.” These thoughts is because Kronecker believes that algebraic numbers are countable, and that were numbers that are transcendental are uncountable. Around this time in 1884, Cantor would face depression for the first time until the end of his life. Even thru his fight with depression, Cantor would attend the first International Congress of Mathematicians in 1897. Here Cantor would relight his friendship with Dedekind. Cantor would become ill in 1905 after returning home from the hospital he would write much religious work even saying that God gave him the set theory. Cantor would deal with health problems again in 1909, but Cantor would not retire till the year 1913 at the age of 68. “In June 1917 he entered a sanatorium for the last time and continually wrote to his wife asking to be allowed to go home. He died of a heart attack.” (O’Connor and