Jour Fixe: “Different kinds of infinity”
The Zukunftskolleg invited everyone to the jour fixe led by Philip Welch (Senior Fellow / Philosophy).
We invited you to our Jour fixe on 23 May 2023.
Philip Welch (Senior Fellow / Mathematics / University of Bristol, UK) gave a talk entitled “Different kinds of infinity”.
Abstract:
Georg Cantor in 12 Dec. 1873 discovered that there was more than one kind of infinity. This went against the grain of contemporary orthodoxy, and his ideas took some while to work their way through to the mainstream. By 1900 David Hilbert, who was probably the late 19'th century's greatest mathematician, was championing Cantor, later saying that "Nobody can drive us from the Paradise that Cantor has created". Together with the fellows he briefly looked at the background here from the Greeks onwards and saw how Cantor's argument works. (No knowledge of infinity is assumed.)