Georg Cantor

Georg Cantor (1845-1918)
The German Georg Cantor was an outstanding violinist, but an even more
outstanding mathematician. He was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he
lived until he was eleven. Thereafter, the family moved to Germany, and Cantor
received his remaining education at Darmstradt, Zrich, Berlin and (almost
inevitably) Gttingen before marrying and settling at the University of Halle,
where he was to spend the rest of his career.
He was made full professor at Halle at the age of just 34, a notable
accomplishment, but his ambitions to move to a more prestigious university, such
as Berlin, were largely thwarted by Leopold Kronecker, a well-established figure
within the mathematical community and Cantor's former professor, who
fundamentally disagreed with the thrust of Cantor's work.
Cantors first ten papers were on number theory, after which he turned his attention
to calculus (or analysis as it had become known by this time), solving a difficult
open problem on the uniqueness of the representation of a function by

trigonometric series. His main legacy, though, is as perhaps the first mathematician
to really understand the meaning of infinity and to give it mathematical precision.
Back in the 17th Century, Galileo had tried to confront the idea of infinity and the
apparent contradictions thrown up by comparisons of different infinities, but in the
end shied away from the problem. He had shown that a one-to-one correspondence
could be drawn between all the natural numbers and the squares of all the natural
numbers to infinity, suggesting that there were just as many square numbers as
integers, even though it was intuitively obvious there were many integers that were
were not squares, a concept which came to be known as Galileos Paradox. He had
also pointed out that two concentric circles must both be comprised of an infinite
number of points, even though the larger circle would appear to contain more
points. However, Galileo had essentially dodged the issue and reluctantly
concluded that concepts like less, equals and greater could only be applied to finite
sets of numbers, and not to infinite sets. Cantor, however, was not content with this
compromise. Cantor's starting point was to say that, if it was possible to add 1 and
1, or 25 and 25, etc, then it ought to be possible to add infinity and infinity. He
realized that it was actually possible to add and subtract infinities, and that beyond
what was normally thought of as infinity existed another, larger infinity, and then
other infinities beyond that. In fact, he showed that there may be infinitely many
sets of infinite numbers - an infinity of infinities - some bigger than others, a
concept which clearly has philosophical, as well as just mathematical, significance.
The sheer audacity of Cantors theory set off a quiet revolution in the mathematical
community, and changed forever the way mathematics is approached.
His first intimations of all this came in the early 1870s when he
considered an infinite series of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...), and then an
infinite series of multiples of ten (10, 20 , 30, 40, 50, ...). He realized that, even
though the multiples of ten were clearly a subset of the natural numbers, the two
series could be paired up on a one-to-one basis (1 with 10, 2 with 20, 3 with 30,
etc) - a process known as bijection - to show that they were the same sizes of
infinite sets, in that they had the same number of elements.
This clearly also applies to other subsets of the natural numbers, such as the even
numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc, or the squares 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, etc, and even to the set of
negative numbers and integers. In fact, Cantor realized that he could, in the same
way, even pair up all the fractions (or rational numbers) with all the whole
numbers, thus showing that rational numbers were also the same sort of infinity as
the natural numbers, despite the intuitive feeling that there must be more fractions
than whole numbers.
As he aged, Cantor suffered from more and more recurrences of mental illness,
which some have directly linked to his constant contemplation of such complex,
abstract and paradoxical concepts. In the last decades of his life, he did no
mathematical work at all, but wrote extensively on his two obsessions: that
Shakespeares plays were actually written by the English philosopher Sir Francis
Bacon, and that Christ was the natural son of Joseph of Arimathea. He spent long
periods in the Halle sanatorium recovering from attacks of manic depression and
paranoia, and it was there, alone in his room, that he finally died in 1918, his great
project still unfinished.
However,
considered
series of
numbers,
irrational
like ,e and
broke
several
arguments
"diagonal
explained in
right) to
was always
construct a
number that
from the
and so
infinity of
numbers
real
in fact
infinity of
numbers.
Cantors diagonal argument for the existence of

uncountable sets
when Cantor
an infinite
decimal
which includes
numbers
2, this method
down. He used
clever
(one being the
argument"
the box on the
show how it
possible to
new decimal
was missing
original list,
proved that the
decimal
(or, technically,
numbers) was
bigger than the
natural
He also showed that they were non-denumerable or "uncountable" (i.e. contained

more elements than could ever be counted), as opposed to the set of rational
numbers which he had shown were technically (even if not practically)
denumerable or "countable". In fact, it can be argued that there are an infinite

number of irrational numbers in between each and every rational number. The
pattern less decimals of irrational numbers fill the "spaces" between the patterns of
the rational numbers.
Cantor coined the new word transfinite in an attempt to distinguish these various
levels of infinite numbers from an absolute infinity, which the religious Cantor
effectively equated with God (he saw no contradiction between his mathematics
and the traditional concept of God). Although the cardinality (or size) of a finite set
is just a natural number indicating the number of elements in the set, he also
needed a new notation to describe the sizes of infinite sets, and he used the Hebrew
letter aleph ( ). He defined 0 (aleph-null or aleph-nought) as the cardinality of the
countably infinite set of natural numbers; 1 (aleph-one) as the next larger
cardinality, that of the uncountable set of ordinal numbers; etc. Because of the
unique properties of infinite sets, he showed that 0 + 0 = 0, and also that 0 x
0 = 0.
All of this represented a revolutionary step, and opened up new possibilities in
mathematics. However, it also opened up the possibility of other infinities, for
instance an infinity - or even many infinities - between the infinity of the whole
numbers and the larger infinity of the decimal numbers. This idea is known as the
continuum hypothesis, and Cantor believed (but could not actually prove) that
there was NO such intermediate infinite set. The continuum hypothesis was one of
the 23 important open problems identified by David Hilbert in his famous 1900
Paris lecture, and it remained unproved - and indeed appeared to be improvable for almost a century, until the work of Robinson and Matiyasevich in the 1950s and
1960s

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Georg Cantor

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Georg Cantor (1845-1918)

open problem on the uniqueness of the representation of a function by

Cantors diagonal argument for the existence of

He also showed that they were non-denumerable or "uncountable" (i.e. contained

denumerable or "countable". In fact, it can be argued that there are an infinite

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