Cantor georg biography

Georg Cantor’s early life

Georg Cantor was born on 3 March in western merchant colony at St. Petersburg, Russia as the eldest child of his father and his full name was Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor. His father was a Danish Jewish merchant that had changed to Protestantism and his mother a Danish Roman Catholic. He did his primary schooling in private tuition in the Lutheran mission. He lived in the city up to the age of eleven and his family moved to Frankfurt German when his father got ill for a warmer climate in where he was to spend the rest of his life. Georg Cantor&#;s talent mathematics began to show off at the age of fifteen when he was in a gymnasium. His father wanted him to be an engineer but he didn&#;t like it as he liked mathematics; he lacked the courage to tell his father about his interest in mathematics (Ruker , pp.  ).

Before joining the college he requested his father to allow him to pursue mathematics and he accepted. He joined the University of Zurich in and transferred the next year after the death of his father to the University of Berlin where he studied mathematics, philosophy and physics (Dauben, pp.  ).

In he was awarded a doctorate but he did not get a good job and forced to work as a unpaid lecture and later as an assistant professor at the Backwater University of Halle. He got married to Valley Guttman in and had six children his last born in before he died on 6 January (Dauben, pp. ).

His contributions

During his life Georg Cantor proved several concepts in mathematics that other mathematicians ahead of him were unable to prove. Cantor was encouraged by his friend at Halle who was working on trigonometric series to work on the uniqueness of infinite series. In he was able to prove that rational numbers are countable, he added that algebraic numbers that are roots,

Georg Cantor, a mathematician who created set theory and a corresponding theory of transfinite numbers, revolutionized mathematics at the end of the nineteenth century with his ideas about the infinite, which were to be of profound significance not only for mathematics but for philosophy and many allied disciplines as well.

He was born on March 3, , in St. Petersburg, Russia, to Georg Woldemar Cantor, a successful merchant and the son of a Jewish businessman from Copenhagen, and Maria Anna Böhm, who came from a family of notable musicians and was a Roman Catholic. But Cantor's father, raised in a Lutheran mission, was a deeply religious man and passed his own strong convictions on to his son. Later in life, Cantor's religious beliefs would play a significant role in his steadfast faith in the correctness of his controversial transfinite set theory, just as his mother's Catholicism may have made him particularly amenable to the substantial correspondence he undertook with Catholic theologians over the nature of the infinite from a theological perspective.

Early Mathematical Studies

Cantor received his doctorate in from the University of Berlin, where he had studied with Leopold Kronecker, Ernst Eduard Kummer, and Karl Weierstrass. His dissertation was devoted to number theory, as was his Habilitationsschrift. When Cantor began teaching as an instructor at the University of Halle, among his colleagues there was Eduard Heinrich Heine. Heine had been working on problems related to trigonometric series, and he urged Cantor to take up the challenging problem of whether or not, given an arbitrary function represented by a trigonometric series, the representation was unique. In Heine had established the uniqueness of such representations for almost-everywhere continuous functions, assuming the uniform convergence of the trigonometric series in question. Cantor succeeded in establishing increasingly general versions of the uniqueness theorem

Georg Cantor was a popular German mathematician. He is best known as the inventor of set theory that later became a fundamental theory in mathematics. He was able to establish the importance of one-to-one correspondence between members of two sets, well-ordered sets, and defined infinite sets. These proved that real numbers are much more numerous than natural numbers. Actually, his theorem implies the existence of ‘infinity of infinities.’ Georg also defined the ordinal and cardinal numbers and their arithmetic.

Early Life and Education

Georg Cantor was born on March 3, in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire. He was brought up in the city until he turned He was the oldest of six children and was regarded as a great violinist. His grandfather was a famous musician and the soloist in the Russian Empire in an imperial orchestra. His dad had been a member of the St. Petersburg stock exchange.

In , Georg’s father became ill and moved the family to Germany. They first went to Wiesbaden before going to Frankfurt. They were seeking winters milder than those in St. Petersburg. In , Georg graduated with a distinction from Realschule in Darmstadt. His great skills in mathematics and trigonometry were noted. In , he enrolled at the University of Zurich. This was after receiving his inheritance after his father passed way in He later shifted to the University of Berlin. He spent the summer at University of Gottingen.

Teaching and Research Career

In , Georg Cantor completed his dissertation on number theory while at the University of Berlin. He briefly taught in a girl’s school before taking up a position at the University of Halle. He spent his entire career here and was awarded the requisite habilitation for his thesis and number theory that he

Georg Cantor (3 March - 6 January ) was an important German mathematician. He founded set theory and worked on transfinite numbers.

Life

Cantor was born in St Petersburg, Russia. His father had a Jewish-Danish, his mother an Austrian background. His father was a Protestant. He was a rich merchant. His mother was a Roman Catholic. She was very artistic. When his father became ill in the family moved to Frankfurt. Georg went to private schools and then to gymnasien in Darmstadt and Wiesbaden. He soon showed that he was brilliant at maths. His father wanted him to be an engineer but Georg persuaded him to let him study mathematics. He spent a short time studying at the University of Zürich, but soon went to Berlin where he studied physics, philosophy and mathematics. He was very influenced by the teaching of Weierstrass, Kummer and Kronecker, who were later to become his enemies. He wrote a doctoral thesis in which he said that asking questions was more important than finding the answers. He was talking about a problem that Carl Friedrich Gauss had left unanswered.

Cantor taught for a time at a girls’ school in Berlin, then he became a lecturer in Halle where he remained for the rest of his life. He became full professor there in Cantor worked on the theory of numbers, continuum hypothesis and then on trigonometric series, starting with ideas that had been developed by Bernhard Riemann on complex variables. He sent a paper on algebraic numbers to be published in Crelle's Journal, but Kronecker was against it. However, Dedekind supported Cantor, and eventually the article was published. This article showed that Cantor was a great mathematician.

When his father died in he had enough money to build a house for his wife and five children.

Cantor thought that infinite numbers really existed, and used ideas from ancient and medievalphilosophy to prove his point. Kronecker disagreed with him. H