Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#21

Post by JadeNB »

dkarl wrote: post #4

> In their 1872 papers, though, Cantor and Dedekind had found a way to construct a number line that was complete. No matter how much you zoomed in on any given stretch of it, it remained an unbroken expanse of infinitely many real numbers, continuously linked. > Suddenly, the monstrosity of infinity, long feared by mathematicians, could no longer be relegated to some unreachable part of the number line. It hid within…

> Give x That's only obviously irrational if x and y are rational. (But maybe you meant that, given an arbitrary interval a < b, you first shrink it to a rational interval a < x < y < b?)

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#22

Post by leephillips »

QuesnayJr wrote: post #17
leephillips wrote: post #2

“Noether, who was Jewish, fled from Germany to the U.S., where she died two years later from cancer” It wasn’t two years, and it wasn’t cancer. These details are unimportant to the (quite interesting) story, but the error is a sign that the author copies information from unreliable secondary sources, which puts the other facts in the article in doubt. I wrote to him about the error when the article first appeared, bu…

Are you citing your own book?

It won’t be the last time.

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#23

Post by freehorse »

collabs wrote: post #13
dang wrote: post #5

I think we can do without the baity title since most HN readers should know who Cantor and Dedekind are. Edit: okay, maybe not Dedekind. If someone wants to suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article itself), we can change it again.

This comment made me think of this xkcd 2501 https://xkcd.com/2501 There really is an xkcd for everything

To be fair, if one does not know who cantor and dedekind were, the drama about the former plagiarising the latter is probably not that interesting anyway.

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#24

Post by Chinjut »

dkarl wrote: post #4

> In their 1872 papers, though, Cantor and Dedekind had found a way to construct a number line that was complete. No matter how much you zoomed in on any given stretch of it, it remained an unbroken expanse of infinitely many real numbers, continuously linked. > Suddenly, the monstrosity of infinity, long feared by mathematicians, could no longer be relegated to some unreachable part of the number line. It hid within…

I don't like the way it's written, but what they are talking about is completeness in the sense of "Dedekind completeness"; i.e., that given any two sets A and B with everyone in A below everyone in B, there is some number which is simultaneously an upper bound for A and a lower bound for B.

Note that this fails for the rationals: e.g., if we let A be the rationals below sqrt(2) and B be the rationals above sqrt(2).

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#25

Post by QuesnayJr »

From the article it's hard to tell if Cantor really did plagiarize (though it seems Dedekind thought he did).

According to the article, Cantor proved the theorem first and sent it to Dedekind. Dedekind suggested a simplification of the proof, which Cantor used when he wrote it up. The story doesn't make Cantor look good, but if the original proof by Cantor is correct, then the credit for the theorem still basically belongs to Cantor.

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#26

Post by [deleted] »

dkarl wrote: post #4

> In their 1872 papers, though, Cantor and Dedekind had found a way to construct a number line that was complete. No matter how much you zoomed in on any given stretch of it, it remained an unbroken expanse of infinitely many real numbers, continuously linked. > Suddenly, the monstrosity of infinity, long feared by mathematicians, could no longer be relegated to some unreachable part of the number line. It hid within…

[deleted]

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#27

Post by wizzwizz4 »

leephillips wrote: post #22
QuesnayJr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you citing your own book?

It won’t be the last time.

It's best practice to say something like "Noether's real story is recounted in my book [link]". This both establishes you as a subject matter expert, and stops your comments looking like disingenuous grift.

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#28

Post by johngossman »

lich_king wrote: post #10
leephillips wrote: post #2

“Noether, who was Jewish, fled from Germany to the U.S., where she died two years later from cancer” It wasn’t two years, and it wasn’t cancer. These details are unimportant to the (quite interesting) story, but the error is a sign that the author copies information from unreliable secondary sources, which puts the other facts in the article in doubt. I wrote to him about the error when the article first appeared, bu…

I have an opinion about the editorial style of Quanta that I don't think it's popular here (judging by how often they get upvoted), but I think it's a symptom of that. They cover science, but the template they consistently follow is a vague title that oversells the premise and then an article filled with human-interest details and appeals to implications. This makes it easy for everyone to follow along and have an op…

I find they are good at identifying interesting topics and writing articles that don't deliver. They remind me of Omni magazine (which I subscribed to at one point). The articles aren't even wrong.

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#29

Post by freehorse »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7
dang wrote: post #5

I think we can do without the baity title since most HN readers should know who Cantor and Dedekind are. Edit: okay, maybe not Dedekind. If someone wants to suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article itself), we can change it again.

Hard disagree I’ll go out on a limb and say the majority of HN users at this point do not know the context and implications of the impact of Cantor - would probably have only heard the name in the context of mathematics but no deeper I’d go further and say the majority have not ever heard of the name Dedekind

I would assume that at least cantors technique of diagonalisation should have found its way into some CS course that I assume a good part of the audience here has studied? Considering that’s what Turing used to prove the undecidability of the halting problem.

Re: New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?

#30

Post by AndrewKemendo »

freehorse wrote: post #29
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree I’ll go out on a limb and say the majority of HN users at this point do not know the context and implications of the impact of Cantor - would probably have only heard the name in the context of mathematics but no deeper I’d go further and say the majority have not ever heard of the name Dedekind

I would assume that at least cantors technique of diagonalisation should have found its way into some CS course that I assume a good part of the audience here has studied? Considering that’s what Turing used to prove the undecidability of the halting problem.

Having been active on this website for 14 years now … At this point I would venture to say The median hacker news commentator does not have aa computer science degree
Post reply on HN