It can have He escaped and put people at that time, but for some he watched the ascension of Leo XIV as the head of the Catholic Church this year was a reminder of the Pope sitting in the chair of St. Peter was born. Georg Cantor’s original theory “NAïVE” Theory caused a revolution and a revolution in mathematical circles, with some accepting his ideas and others rejecting them.
Cantor was disappointed by the negative reaction, of course, but he never had his opinions. Why? Because he firmly established the belief that he had a great line in that absolutely – that his ideas came directly l’inko divino (God’s wisdom). And, like our twin brothers Jake and Elwood, that he was in a God-given opportunity. So when he broke with the mathematical community in 1883, he sought a new audience from the Catholic Pope Leo XIII.
This was in Cantor’s later years, a time when his mind became angry. He developed what I call Isaac Newton Complex: A disgusting and pathological hatred of publishing informed by the paranoid certainty that your contemporaries can clean you up. Either they’re a bunch of haters in the background who don’t care about your work, or, worse, they’re jealous of your intelligence and the selfishness you despise for it. (Newton himself swore off publishing for years because of criticism of his early work.)
“My inclination does not encourage me to publish,” said Cantor in 1887, echoing Newton two centuries earlier. “And I gladly leave this work to others.”
Over the next several years, Cantor increasingly focused on new audiences and tried to make inroads with Catholic authorities. The 1880s was a time when the Catholic Church became more interested in scientific discoveries than ever before. Leo xiii, who became pope in 1878, has a special interest in science, especially cosmology. Science is the way forward, he says, and he keeps an astrologer in the Vatican – built by himself in charge of himself. He fills it with beautiful modern equipment and keeps trained astronomers on staff.
Cantor thinks that the church has a lot to offer and that the idea has a lot to give back. He wants the Catholic church to be aware of his ideas because he sets the idea as a way to understand the infinite nature of the divine mind – perhaps the mind of God, expressed in figures. It’s not worth it Thinking?
It’s a hard sell.
Cantor shares his work with Cardinal Johannes Franzelin of the Vatican Council, one of the leading theologians of his day. Franzin wrote Cantor a letter on Christmas Day 1885, saying that he was pleased to get Cantor’s job. He says: “He says:” He says: “It seems that” it seems that “it seems that it has not softened the power of such hostility and intelligence towards Christian principles and Catholic principles.” That said, Franzelin adds, Cantor’s views may be indefensible and “in a sense, although the author does not seem to intend to, contain the error of plagiarism.”
