All of these debates came together through the pioneering work of the German mathematician Georg Cantor on the concept of a set. Cantor had begun work in this area because of his interest in Riemann’s theory of trigonometric series, but the problem of what characterized the set of all real numbers came to occupy him more and more. He began to discover unexpected properties of sets. For example, he could show that the set of all algebraic numbers, and a fortiori the set of all rational numbers, is countable in the sense that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the ...(100 of 41449 words)