Georg Cantor

Albert Einstein famously said: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe.” The notion of infinity has been pondered by the greatest minds over the ages, from Aristotle to German mathematician Georg Cantor. To most people today, it is something that is ...

In the late 19th century, the German mathematician Georg Cantor captured the spirit of this matching strategy in the formal language of mathematics. He proved that two sets have the same size, or “cardinality,” when they can be put into one-to-one correspondence with each other—when there is exactly ...

Almost 150 years ago Georg Cantor, the mathematician, showed that there were at least two different kinds of infinity. One kind of infinity involved “countable” sets of numbers. Countable sets are, for example, the whole numbers (1, 2, 3 . . .), the even or odd numbers, the primes and fractions. All these sets ...