As the plane settled down at Ben Gurion airport, the voice of the Captain came on:
"Please remain seated with your seatbelt fastened until this plane is at a complete standstill and the seat belt signs have been turned off.""To those of you standing in the aisles, we wish you a Happy Hanukkah."
"To those who have remained in their seats, we wish you a Merry Christmas."
Georg CantorBorn 3 Mar 1845; died 6 Jan 1918 at age 72. Georg (Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp) Cantor was a Russian-German mathematician who created modern set theory and extended it to give the concept of transfinite numbers,with cardinal and ordinal number classes. Although Cantor's earliest work was concerned with Fourier series, his reputation rests upon his contribution to transfinite set theory. He began with the definition of infinite sets proposed by Dedekind in 1872: a set is infinite when it is similar to a proper part of itself. Sets with this property, such as the set of natural numbers are said to be 'denumerable' or 'countable'. His career was repeatedly interrupted after 1884 by mental illness. He died of heart failure in 1918 in a mental institution. |
