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Shelfari edited the description of Tuesday, August 18 2009.

• In the late 19th century, a brilliant mathematician languished in an asylum. His greatest accomplishment, the result of a series of leaps of insight, was his pioneering understanding of the nature of infinity. This is the story of Georg Cantor: how he came to his theories and the reverberations of his work, the consequences of which shape our world.Cantor's theory of the infinite is famous for its many seeming contradictions: for example, we can prove there are as many points on a line one inch long as on a line one mile long; we can also prove that in all time there are as many years as there are days. According to Cantor, infinite sets are equal.The mind-twisting, deeply philosophical work of Cantor has its roots in ancient Greek mathematics and Jewish numerology as found in the mystical work known as the Kabbalah. Cantor used the term aleph-the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with all its attendant divine associations-to refer to the mysterious number which is the sum of positive integers. It is not the last positive number, because . . . there is no last. It is the ultimate number that is always being approached: just as, for example, there is no last fraction before the number 1.