Moritz Cantor – Wikipedia

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From Wikipedia, Liberade Libera.

Moritz Benedikt Cantor
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Benedikt Moritz Cantor (Mannheim, 23 August 1829 – Heidelberg, April 10, 1920) was a German mathematician, the first professor of history of Germany mathematics.
It also has the merit of the founder, in the 19th century, of many scientific magazines.

Born in a family of Sefardi Jews originally from Portugal, who had settled in the Netherlands, Moritz Cantor was so fragile of health that he was unable to attend school and his parents decided to provide at home to his training.
In any case, he managed to achieve a level of education such as to be admitted to the High School of Mannheim a year in advance. In 1848 he began attending the University of Heidelberg to then move on to the University of Gottinga, where he followed the courses of Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber. In the same university, Moritz Abraham Stern awakened a great interest in Historical Research in him.

After his doctoral thesis at the University of Heidelberg (1851), to listen to Lejeune-Drichlet’s conferences, he moved to Berlin, where he also followed the courses of Jakob Steiner. In 1853 he returned to Heidelberg where he obtained the title of private lecturer with a qualification thesis entitled Basic principles of arithmetic ( Basic features of an arithmetics elementary ). In 1860 he began to teach the history of mathematics and in 1863 he became an associate professor.
In 1877 he became a full professor in the same university.

Moritz Cantor was one of the founders of the magazine Critical magazine for chemistry, physics and mathematics . In 1859 he became, together with Oskar Schlömilch, publisher of Journal of Mathematics and Physics . His passion for the history of science was such that in 1877, a supplement to the magazine was published with the title of Treatises on the history of mathematics (Dissertations on the history of mathematics).

Its first publication, About a less common coordinate system , (1851), had not given any signal of the fact that the history of the exact sciences would have been so soon enriched by a masterpiece of writing as what he himself did.
His first prominent job was About the introduction of our current digits in Europe , written for the magazine Journal of Mathematics and Physics , vol. I, in 1856.

But his greatest job was Lectures on the history of mathematics , consisting of three volumes (1880-1898) and then from a quarter published posthumously.

The first volume retraces the general history of mathematics until 1200. The second volume traces history until 1668. The year 1668 was chosen by Cantor, because in this year Newton and Leibniz embarked on their mathematical research. The third volume continues the overview of history until 1758, once again chosen because the meaning of Joseph-Louis Lagrange’s work began shortly after that date.

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After the completion of the third volume, Cantor realized that, at the age of 69, he would not have been up to him to complete another volume, so at the 1904 congress in Heidelberg he selected a team Of nine scholars, among whom Gino Loria, Florian Cajori, Eugen Netto and Giulio Vivanti were present, who helped him conclude his latest book.
The latter volume retraces the history of mathematics until the year 1799, the year of Gauss’s doctoral thesis. As a coordinator of the work, Cantor insisted a lot with his disciples on the fact that the style and impartiality of the first three volumes was preserved.
However, the latest book reports a series of errors that report a certain lightness and a little scrupulous use of the sources that Cantor had available.

In any case, despite some errors of various gravity, many historians consider Moritz Cantor as the true founder of the history of mathematics, a discipline that, before him, was lacking in method, critical thinking and consistency of historical approach.

  • Jewish Encyclopedia , 1906

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