Moritz Benedikt Cantor was a German historian of mathematics. His Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik (“Lectures on the History of Mathematics”) is considered one of the finest published histories of mathematics, the work traces mathematical development from earliest times up to 1799.
Background
Cantor was born on August 23, 1829, at Mannheim, Germany. He came from a Sephardi Jewish family that had emigrated to the Netherlands from Portugal, another branch of which had established itself in Russia. His father, Isaac Benedikt Cantor, was from Amsterdam; his mother, Nelly Schnapper, was the daughter of a money changer.
Education
Cantor was first taught by private tutors and completed his secondary education at the Gymnasium in Mannheim. In 1848 he began studying at Heidelberg under Franz Schweins and Arthur Arneth. He took his degree at Heidelberg in 1851 with the thesis Ein wenig gebräuchliches Coordinatensystem. During the summer semester of 1852 he studied in Berlin under Dirichlet and Jakob Steiner and qualified for inauguration at Heidelberg in 1853 with Grundzüge einer Elementar-Arithnietik.
From 1849 to 1851 Cantor worked at Göttingen under Gauss and Moritz Stern. He was greatly influenced by Arneth’s Geschichte der reinen Mathematik in ihrer Beziehung zur Entwicklung des menschlichen Geistes and was encouraged in his work by Stern and the cultural philosopher E. M. Roeth. During a stay in Paris he became a close friend of Chasles and of Joseph Bertrand. From 1860 he lectured on the history of mathematics.
In 1863, as a result of his Mathematischen Beiträge zum Culturleben der Völker, Cantor was appointed an extraordinary professor. The Römischen Agrimensoren und ihre Stellung in der Geschichte der Feldmesskunst (1875) led to his appointment as an honorary professor; in 1908 he became full professor, and in 1913 he became emeritus. From 1856 to 1860 Cantor was coeditor of Kritischen Zeitschrift für Chemie, Physik und Mathematik, and from 1860 of Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik; from 1877 to 1899 he edited Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik. He published many short papers and reviews in periodicals devoted to pure mathematics and the history of science and, from 1875, wrote most of the biographies of mathematicians in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.
Cantor died on April 10, 1920, in Heidelber, Germany. Many historians credit him for founding a new discipline in a field that had hitherto lacked the sound, conscientious, and critical methods of other fields of history.