Re: [HM] Mengenlehre, a disease from which one has recovered
Julio Gonzalez Cabillon (jgc@adinet.com.uy)
Mon, 14 Sep 1998 19:34:03 -0300
At 10:18 AM 13/09/1998 +0400, Tom Archibald wrote:
| Cantor himself went to some effort to make connections with
| ancient and medieval ideas about infinity in his famous series of
| papers on set theory. The fifth of these (I mean the one on Math
| Ann 21, 545-586) contains lengthy portions on the history of
| philosophy.
|
| Poincare' was drafted to translate these into French for Acta
| Mathematica by his mentor Hermite. He found them much too
| philosophical at the time (as we know from Hermite's
| correspondence with Mittag-Leffler, published by Dugac). Poincare's
| French versions reorder the material and omit much of the
| philosophical discussion, apparently with Cantor's agreement since
| the translations were revised by him. [...]
Concerning the French version which appeared in _Acta Mathematica_ (1883),
Mittag-Leffler had requested Cantor himself to reorder his writings and
leave out as much as possible the philosophical flavour of his discussion.
--JGC