Youth and studies
Georg Cantor was born in 1845 in the western merchant colony of Saint Petersburg, Russia, and brought up in the city until he was eleven. Cantor, the oldest of six children, was

Cantor's work between 1874 and 1884 is the origin of set theory. Prior to this work, the concept of a set was a rather elementary one that had been used implicitly since the beginning of mathematics, dating back to the ideas of Aristotle.

Cantor's paternal grandparents were from Copenhagen and fled to Russia from the disruption of the Napoleonic Wars. There is very little direct information on them. Cantor's father, Georg

• Absolute Infinite
• Aleph number
• Cardinality of the continuum
• Cantor medal – award by the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung in honor of Georg Cantor

The concept of the existence of an actual infinity was an important shared concern within the realms of mathematics, philosophy and religion. Preserving the orthodoxy of the relationship between God and mathematics, although not in the same form as held by his

Until the 1970s, the chief academic publications on Cantor were two short monographs by Arthur Moritz Schönflies (1927) – largely the correspondence with Mittag-Leffler – and Fraenkel (1930). Both were at second and third hand; neither had much on his personal

Older sources on Cantor's life should be treated with caution. See section § Biographies above.
Primary literature in English
• Cantor, Georg (1955) [1915]. Philip Jourdain (ed.). Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers