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Georg Cantor
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===Later years and death=== After Cantor's 1884 hospitalization there is no record that he was in any [[sanatorium]] again until 1899.<ref name="daub282">[[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], p. 282.</ref> Soon after that second hospitalization, Cantor's youngest son Rudolph died suddenly on 16 December (Cantor was delivering a lecture on his views on [[Baconian theory]] and [[William Shakespeare]]), and this tragedy drained Cantor of much of his passion for mathematics.<ref name="daub283">[[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], p. 283.</ref> Cantor was again hospitalized in 1903. One year later, he was outraged and agitated by a paper presented by [[Julius König]] at the Third [[International Congress of Mathematicians]]. The paper attempted to prove that the basic tenets of [[transfinite set theory]] were false. Since the paper had been read in front of his daughters and colleagues, Cantor perceived himself as having been publicly humiliated.<ref>For a discussion of König's paper see [[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], pp. 248–250. For Cantor's reaction, see [[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], pp. 248, 283.</ref> Although [[Ernst Zermelo]] demonstrated less than a day later that König's proof had failed, Cantor remained shaken, and momentarily questioning God.<ref name="daub248">[[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], p. 248.</ref> Cantor suffered from chronic depression for the rest of his life, for which he was excused from teaching on several occasions and repeatedly confined to various sanatoria. The events of 1904 preceded a series of hospitalizations at intervals of two or three years.<ref>[[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], pp. 283–284.</ref> He did not abandon mathematics completely, however, lecturing on the paradoxes of set theory ([[Burali-Forti paradox]], [[Cantor's paradox]], and [[Russell's paradox]]) to a meeting of the [[German Mathematical Society|''Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung'']] in 1903, and attending the International Congress of Mathematicians at [[Heidelberg]] in 1904. In 1911, Cantor was one of the distinguished foreign scholars invited to the 500th anniversary of the founding of the [[University of St. Andrews]] in Scotland. Cantor attended, hoping to meet [[Bertrand Russell]], whose newly published ''[[Principia Mathematica]]'' repeatedly cited Cantor's work, but the encounter did not come about. The following year, St. Andrews awarded Cantor an honorary doctorate, but illness precluded his receiving the degree in person. Cantor retired in 1913, and lived in poverty and suffered from [[Malnutrition|malnourishment]] during [[World War I]].<ref name="daub284">[[#Dauben1979|Dauben 1979]], p. 284.</ref> The public celebration of his 70th birthday was canceled because of the war. In June 1917, he entered a sanatorium for the last time and continually wrote to his wife asking to be allowed to go home. Georg Cantor had a fatal heart attack on 6 January 1918, in the sanatorium where he had spent the last year of his life.<ref name=":0" />
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