Tav (number)
Template:Short description In his work on set theory, Georg Cantor denoted the collection of all cardinal numbers by the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (transliterated as Tav, Taw, or Sav.) 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.<ref name="GesammelteAbhandlungen">Gesammelte Abhandlungen,<ref>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, Template:Isbn.</ref> 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,<ref>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.</ref> 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.</ref><ref>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.</ref>
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