Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philip Cantor
1845-1918

Georg Cantor was born in Russia to Danish parents, and the family later moved to Frankfurt, Germany. Cantor studied at the University of Berlin under mathematicians Karl Weierstrass, Ernst Kummer, and Leopold Kronecker. He became a professor at the University of Halle, where he spent the rest of his career.

It was Cantor who began to apply his newly founded set theory to infinite sets. He made controversial discoveries about the nature of such sets when he attempted to set them into 1-1 correspondence with the integers. His theories were widely contested, especially by his former mentor Kronecker.

He was afflicted by mental illness from about 1884 to the end of his life, but he continued to contribute to mathematics. His work was eventually recognized for its impact on mathematics and number theory.