Will Cantor’s Paradise Ever Be of Practical Use? http://devlinsangle.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/will-cantors-paradise-ever-be-of.html
"It was Georg Cantor (1845 – 1918) who really tackled infinity head on. His proof that the set of real numbers cannot be put into one-one correspondence with the natural numbers, and hence is of a larger order of infinitude, led to a series of papers, published in a remarkable ten-year period between 1874 and 1884, that formed the basis for modern abstract set theory, including the development of a fully formed arithmetical theory of infinite numbers (or “cardinals”). Reactions to Cantor’s revolutionary new ideas ranged from outraged condemnation to fulsome praise. Henri Poincaré called Cantor’s work a “grave disease” that threatened to infect mathematics, and Leopold Kronecker described Cantor as a “scientific charlatan” and a “corrupter of youth.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing long after Cantor's death, complained that mathematics had become “ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory,” a theory he dismissed as “utter nonsense,” “laughable,” and “wrong.” At the other end of the spectrum, in 1904, in the UK the Royal Society awarded Cantor its highest award, the Sylvester Medal, and in Germany David Hilbert declared that “No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created.”" _______________________________________________ Logica-l mailing list [email protected] http://www.dimap.ufrn.br/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/logica-l
