Talk:Georg Cantor

Memorial in Halle

There is a memorial bust of him in Halle - https://thalesandfriends.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/monument.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.16.72.221 (talk) 18:32, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Chronic depresson

What is the source for the claim of chronic depression? 73.193.148.242 (talk) 15:37, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Is that in "Dauben 1979, pp. 283–284"? Which sentence(s) this is a source for is unclear to me. The Crab Who Played With The Sea (talk) 01:28, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Quote from Dauben on Bell

The quote from Dauben in the Biographies section has no connection to the preceding paragraph - it doesn't even mention Bell. Unhandyandy (talk) 20:16, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Article presents Cantor's results as unconditional truth, despite finitist school existing.

> Cantor ... proved that the real numbers are more numerous than the natural numbers

The article should clearly state that Cantor's proof is only valid within the (nowadays mainstream) trans-finitist school, but invalid in the views of finitist / intuitionalist / Aristotelean schools. Article states Cantor's axioms are printed in college curriculums worldwide - but that in not a proof of truthfulness, just suppression of valid alternative schools of mathematics. 94.21.160.96 (talk) 94.21.160.96 (talk) 22:43, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

The article holds the opinion of a few figures doubting Cantor's Jewish ancestry in a higher regard than Cantor and his brother's own claims

Regardless of the fact that both of his parents were likely raised Christian in one form or another, the first paragraph of the Biography section states that his maternal grandfather was the brother of Joseph Böhm, who is documented as being Jewish. Cantor's brother is also cited as referring to their prominently Jewish ancestry in a letter to their mother.

Then there is the quote of Cantor himself describing his paternal grandparents as members of the Portuguese Jewish community in Copenhagen. In addition, the surname "Cantor" is already quite associated with Jewish families, and is certainly not a common "standard" Danish surname: English Wikipedia actually has just one article for a Danish Cantor, Theodore Cantor, where it is cited he was Jewish.

So it seems that at least three of Cantor's grandparents were historically described as Jewish (by Cantor, his brother and others), but the article almost presents this as refuted by:

• 1. Referencing a historian of mathematics (Ivor Grattan-Guinness) who claimed in 1971 that he couldn't find evidence of Jewish ancestry (it's worth pointing out that in his paper Grattan-Guiness states that Cantor's parents had four children, contrary to this article where it is stated that Cantor was "the oldest of six" [but perhaps the article here mixed information up as Cantor is also stated to have had six children], and he also makes no mention of the Böhm family being Jewish).
• 2. Quoting a reference to a "1937 notice by the Danish genealogical Institute" which declared Cantor's father "is not present in the registers of the Jewish community, and that he completely without doubt was not a Jew" (which is largely what Grattan-Guinness has relied on, along with assumptions about the Cantor family's circumstances being unlikely for those of Jewish backgrounds).

I'm not sure declarations about prominent figures being "without doubt not Jewish" in the year 1937 can be taken at face value (especially when such a conclusion is based on the child of apparent converts to Christianity not being registered in the Jewish community), and it's not clear how well has the referenced historian researched Cantor's ancestry. Is it to the point that his findings (or lack thereof) should override Cantor and his brother's own personal accounts? ThisNameIsAvailable (talk) 04:05, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

The current text doesn't seem to make any direct claim about the answer to this question, but only quotes various sources and passes on their claims without judgment. Letting sources speak for themselves and leaving readers to draw conclusions, rather than making firm statements in Wikipedia's authorial voice, is usually a good way to handle controversial questions. If you have reliable (in the Wikipedia sense, see WP:RS) secondary sources making further claims about this topic, it seems like it would be fine to link/quote them. –jacobolus (t) 04:45, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Maybe we should split off the "Cantor's ancestry" section into its own article, so that people who care about it can go argue about it on a page that I don't have on my watchlist. This uninteresting discussion has consumed a fraction of this talk page all out of proportion to its relevance to the topic. --Trovatore (talk) 06:21, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

I'll start with the fact that the article had featured the "German people of Jewish descent" category until it was removed by someone in this revision: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Georg_Cantor&direction=next&oldid=908518770

Secondly, there is not much a of a point in the article (supposedly) not making a claim about the subject when at the very least we know Cantor's mother descended from a family of prominent musicians of Jewish origin. And again, if Cantor himself has referred to his paternal lineage as "Portuguese Israelite" (which can be a conscious attempt by him to denote ancestry without personally applying a religion, as it is possible his father has never adhered to Judaism in any way) along with his father's unusual surname for a Danish, the arguments against it seem weak to me.

Regarding secondary sources, I found a pretty extensive genealogical research into Cantor's family done by a German mathematician and he points to all of Cantor's recent paternal ancestry being Jewish, with some of them having their birth names changed upon being baptized; he also stipulates that the 1937 Danish investigation of Cantor's parernal ancestry was done at the request of his descendants living in Nazi Germany, who needed to disprove claims of Jewish ancestry in order to save themselves.

It was originally published in German: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00591-020-00289-x

And it was also translated into Danish, where a summary in English was appended: https://hilbib.dk/work/work-of:150094-artikel:127718

I don't know how to define the source's reliability, it seems to have been originally published in the German Mathematische Semesterberichte journal through Springer Nature. But considering Grattan-Guinness pretty much just quoted the 1937 Danish investigation to repeat its conclusion, I'm not sure this one is a less credible source. ThisNameIsAvailable (talk) 09:17, 4 April 2025 (UTC)