Tav (number)

In his work on set theory, Georg Cantor denoted the collection of all cardinal numbers by the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ת (transliterated as Taf, Tav, or Taw.) As Cantor realized, this collection could not itself have a cardinality, as this would lead to a paradox of the Burali-Forti type. Cantor instead said that it was an "inconsistent" collection which was absolutely infinite.^[1][4]

See also

• Taw (letter)
• Aleph number
• Absolute Infinite

References

1. Gesammelte Abhandlungen,^[2] Georg Cantor, ed. Ernst Zermelo, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962, pp. 443–447; translated into English in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931, ed. Jean van Heijenoort, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967, pp. 113–117. These references both purport to be a letter from Cantor to Dedekind, dated July 28, 1899. However, as Ivor Grattan-Guinness has discovered,^[3] this is in fact an amalgamation by Cantor's editor, Ernst Zermelo, of two letters from Cantor to Dedekind, the first dated July 28 and the second dated August 3.
2. Gesammelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und philosophischen Inhalts, Georg Cantor, ed. Ernst Zermelo, with biography by Adolf Fraenkel; orig. pub. Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1932; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962, and Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1980, ISBN 3-540-09849-6.
3. The Rediscovery of the Cantor-Dedekind Correspondence, I. Grattan-Guinness, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 76 (1974/75), pp. 104–139, at p. 126 ff.
4. The Correspondence between Georg Cantor and Philip Jourdain, I. Grattan-Guinness, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 73 (1971/72), pp. 111–130, at pp. 116–117.