This piece originally appeared on Nautilus. Georg Cantor died in 1918 in a sanatorium in Halle, Germany. A pre-eminent mathematician, he had laid the foundation for the theory of infinite numbers in ...

One question has preoccupied humankind for thousands of years: Do infinities exist? More than 2,300 years ago Aristotle distinguished between two types of infinity: potential and actual. The former ...

This problem of infinity was pondered by Georg Cantor. What he concluded started him down a road that wound through infamy, through respectability, and wound up in theology. Find out more than anyone ...

Georg Cantor was a German mathematician of Iberian Jewish descent whom Bertrand Russell considered to be one of the greatest minds of the 19th century. In the course of a colorful but unhappy life, ...

What is the largest natural number possible? By using the word natural, I have ruled out the possibility that you simply answer infinity (∞) to torpedo the guessing game. But even if we allowed ...

In the 1995 film Toy Story, the gung-ho space action figure Buzz Lightyear tirelessly incants his catchphrase: “To infinity... and beyond!” The joke, of course, is rooted in the perfectly reasonable ...

Adrian Moore continues his exploration of two and a half millennia of philosophical thought on infinity. Discover the brilliant but tortured German mathematician, Georg Cantor, who devised a way of ...

Adrian Moore’s series on philosophical thought on infinity finds him mired in a near meltdown in mathematics. Adrian tells the story of the controversy caused by the work of the German mathematician, ...

A team of researchers has stumbled on a question that is mathematically unanswerable because it is linked to logical paradoxes discovered by Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel in the 1930s that can’t ...