Editing Georg Cantor (section)

==Biographies==
Until the 1970s, the chief academic publications on Cantor were two short monographs by [[Arthur Moritz Schönflies]] (1927)&nbsp;– largely the correspondence with Mittag-Leffler&nbsp;– and Fraenkel (1930). Both were at second and third hand; neither had much on his personal life. The gap was largely filled by [[Eric Temple Bell]]'s ''[[Men of Mathematics]]'' (1937), which one of Cantor's modern biographers describes as "perhaps the most widely read modern book on the [[history of mathematics]]"; and as "one of the worst".<ref>[[#Guinness1971|Grattan-Guinness 1971]], p. 350.</ref> Bell presents Cantor's relationship with his father as [[Oedipal]], Cantor's differences with Kronecker as a quarrel between two Jews, and Cantor's madness as Romantic despair over his failure to win acceptance for his mathematics. Grattan-Guinness (1971) found that none of these claims were true, but they may be found in many books of the intervening period, owing to the absence of any other narrative. There are other legends, independent of Bell&nbsp;– including one that labels Cantor's father a foundling, shipped to Saint Petersburg by unknown parents.<ref>[[#Guinness1971|Grattan-Guinness 1971]] (quotation from p. 350, note), [[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], p. 1 and notes. (Bell's Jewish stereotypes appear to have been removed from some postwar editions.)</ref> A critique of Bell's book is contained in [[Joseph Dauben]]'s biography.<ref>[[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]]</ref> Writes Dauben:
{{Blockquote|Cantor devoted some of his most vituperative correspondence, as well as a portion of the ''Beiträge'', to attacking what he described at one point as the '[[infinitesimal]] Cholera bacillus of mathematics', which had spread from Germany through the work of [[Carl Johannes Thomae|Thomae]], [[Paul du Bois-Reymond|du Bois Reymond]] and [[Otto Stolz|Stolz]], to infect Italian mathematics ... Any acceptance of infinitesimals necessarily meant that his own theory of number was incomplete. Thus to accept the work of Thomae, du Bois-Reymond, Stolz and [[Giuseppe Veronese|Veronese]] was to deny the perfection of Cantor's own creation. Understandably, Cantor launched a thorough campaign to discredit Veronese's work in every way possible.<ref>Dauben, J.: The development of the Cantorian set theory, pp.~181–219. See pp.216–217. In Bos, H.; Bunn, R.; Dauben, J.; [[Grattan-Guinness]], I.; Hawkins, T.; Pedersen, K. From the calculus to set theory, 1630–1910. An introductory history. Edited by I. Grattan-Guinness. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., London, 1980.</ref>}}