''Cantor's paradise'' is an expression used by in describing
set theory
Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...
and infinite
cardinal number
In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. T ...
s developed by
Georg Cantor
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor ( , ; – January 6, 1918) was a German mathematician. He played a pivotal role in the creation of set theory, which has become a fundamental theory in mathematics. Cantor established the importance of ...
. The context of Hilbert's comment was his opposition to what he saw as
L. E. J. Brouwer
Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (; ; 27 February 1881 – 2 December 1966), usually cited as L. E. J. Brouwer but known to his friends as Bertus, was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher, who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and compl ...
's reductive attempts to circumscribe what kind of mathematics is acceptable; see
Brouwer–Hilbert controversy
In a controversy over the foundations of mathematics, in twentieth-century mathematics, L. E. J. Brouwer, a proponent of the constructivist school of intuitionism, opposed David Hilbert, a proponent of formalism. The debate concerned fundamenta ...
.
References
*
*{{citation, journal=Mathematische Annalen, jfm=51.0044.02, year=1926, volume= 95, issue=1, pages= 161–190, title=Über das Unendliche, url=https://eudml.org/doc/159124, first=David , last=Hilbert, doi=10.1007/BF01206605
*
Saharon Shelah. You can enter Cantor's paradise! Paul Erdős and his mathematics, II (Budapest, 1999), 555–564, Bolyai Soc. Math. Stud., 11, János Bolyai Math. Soc., Budapest, 2002.
*Peckhaus, Volker. Fixing Cantor's paradise: the prehistory of Ernst Zermelo's axiomatization of set theory. New approaches to classes and concepts, 11–22, Stud. Log. (Lond.), 14, Coll. Publ., London, 2008.
*"About Cantor's Paradise". Medium. A Medium Corporation. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
Set theory
David Hilbert