Voting Station

Georg Cantor

Please vote to see the next celebrity.

Mathematician

The Resume

    (March 3, 1845-January 6, 1918)
    Born in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
    Pioneer of set theory
    Demonstrated that there are different 'sizes' of infinity
    Demonstrated that the real numbers are uncountable (they do not have a one-to-one correspondence with the integers)
    Namesake for the Cantor cube, Cantor space, Cantor function, Cantor's paradox and Heine-Cantor theorem

Why he might be annoying:

    He suffered bouts of depression.
    He treated criticism of his work as a personal attack.
    He believed that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays.
    He claimed that his theories about transfinite numbers had been communicated directly to him by God.
    Henri Poincaire called his ideas 'a grave disease' infecting mathematics.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He was a talented violinist.
    When the journal 'Acta Mathematica' rejected one of his papers as being a hundred years ahead of its time, he quipped to a friend, 'Had [editor Gosta] Mittag-Leffler had his way, I should have to wait to the year 1984, which to me seemed to great a demand!'
    His set theory revolutionized almost every field in mathematics.
    David Hilbert described his work as 'the finest product of mathematical genius and one of the supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 5 Votes: 40.0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 27 Votes: 55.56% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 18 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 14 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 16 Votes: 25.00% Annoying
    In 2011, Out of 23 Votes: 39.13% Annoying