Georg Cantor
(1845 - 1918)
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Mathematician, born in St Petersburg, Russia. He studied at Zurich, Berlin and G?ttingen, and in 1877 became professor of mathematics at Halle. He worked out a highly original arithmetic and published papers on infinite sets. He was able to prove among other things that the set of integers had an equal number of members as the set of even numbers, squares, cubes, and roots to equations. He was berated and chastised by members of the mathematics community who feared the implications of his work would uproot fundamental mathematical truths. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1884, and died in an asylum.
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