Georg Cantor

Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was born to a German family in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire. His father, a merchant, and his mother, a musician, provided a culturally rich environment for young Georg.

The Cantor family moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, to escape the harsh Russian winters. This move marked the beginning of Georg's formal education in Germany.

Cantor began his secondary education at the Wiesbaden Gymnasium, where he excelled in mathematics and showed a particular interest in trigonometry and number theory.

Cantor enrolled at the Polytechnic of Zurich (now ETH Zurich) to study engineering, but his passion for mathematics soon led him to focus on that field.

Cantor completed his doctorate at the University of Berlin under the supervision of Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass, with a thesis on number theory.

Cantor accepted a position as a lecturer at the University of Halle, where he would spend the majority of his academic career, eventually becoming a full professor.

Cantor's groundbreaking paper, 'On a Property of the Collection of All Real Algebraic Numbers,' introduced the concept of one-to-one correspondence and the idea of infinite sets.

Cantor experienced his first documented mental breakdown, which was likely exacerbated by the intense criticism and lack of acceptance of his work in the mathematical community.

Cantor proposed the Continuum Hypothesis, which posits that there is no set whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and the real numbers.

Georg Cantor died in the psychiatric hospital in Halle, Germany, after a long struggle with mental health issues. His work on set theory and the infinite would later be recognized as foundational in modern mathematics.