Talk: Georg Cantor

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I can see something wrong here: "...was a German mathematician who is..." and "...He was born in Saint Petersburg Russia, the..."

he was german or russian? he born in russia, but why does he apear like german in some online documents?. i'm researching for spanish version and can't find a safe exit to this.--Arias Levhita 22:14, Jul 15, 2004 (UTC)

Christian or Jewish?

Georg cantor is listed both in List of Jewish scientists and philosophers and in List of Christian scientists. Which one is right? Was he Christian or Jewish? --Fibonacci 04:00, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, according to footnotes in http://www.jinfo.org/Philosophers.html,

4. In Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell described Cantor as being "of pure Jewish descent on both sides," although both parents were baptized. In a 1971 article entitled "Towards a Biography of George Cantor," the British historian of mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness claimed (Annals of Science 27, pp. 345-391, 1971) to be unable to find any evidence of Jewish ancestry (although he conceded that Cantor's wife, Vally Guttmann, was Jewish). However, a letter written by Georg Cantor to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13, Correspondance, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306) explicitly acknowledges that Cantor's paternal grandparents were members of the Sephardic community of Copenhagen. In a recent book, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity (Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2000. pp. 94, 144), Amir Aczel provides new evidence in the form of a letter, recently uncovered by Nathalie Charraud, that was written by Georg Cantor's brother Louis to their mother. This letter seems to indicate that she was also of Jewish descent, as Bell had claimed originally.

In other words, good question. --jpgordon{gab} 04:08, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Depends on your definition of "Jewish", right? Some definitions would make your question have an exclusive "or". Dauben, the reigning Cantor expert, mentions the info Jpgordon gives above, but he also adds that Cantor was not Jewish "in an orthodox rabbinical sense, since his mother was a Roman Catholic". This is from Dauben's book on Cantor. However, as the whole book makes clear, Cantor was a very devout Christian, making theological researches into the nature of the Trinity even. He was also baptized a Lutheran. So Cantor should definitely be listed as a Christian. I don't know whether all this makes him Jewish --Chan-Ho Suh 03:45, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)