Georg Cantor, born Russian, is a German mathematician of particular note to those masses with interest in everything related to the concept of infinity. Cantor is the father of set theory, having created this now-revolutionary doctrine under much duress from his peers. Prior to Cantor's work in the
University of Berlin and the
University of Halle the concept of using infinity in sets and in application as other more
"real" numbers was almost anathema.
Mathematicians who postulated in the subject were often disregarded offhand or blacklisted all together. Cantor did the majority of his lasting work during the years of 1870-1884 at the University of Halle, a relatively nondescript school of no note at the time. As he delved into the increasingly noted mind altering effects of research into the concept of the infinite he was assaulted by noted scientists of the day. Most prominent among his oppressors was Leopold Kronecker, who subjected anything Cantor published to an extreme level of personal analysis. He succeeded in pioneering his work in the face of adversity. Among Cantor's signifigant achievements apart from transfinite set theory was his proposal that the continuum is an unbroken, complete, and connected set. Cantor's work in set theory has helped the math world to understand the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, much debated over for the past two thousand years. In addition to his conceptualization of a theory to explain Zeno's Paradoxes, Cantor inadvertantly happened upon one of his own. Cantor's Paradox, stemming from the idea that a definable set has more subsets than members, and thus, there can be no all-encompassing set.
Cantor's work is dramatic and expressively revolutionary in higher math, lending a particular will to explore to the art of mathematics; Cantor paved the way in his field for such mathematitians as Ernst Zermelo, Bertrand Russell, and David Hilbert.