Does anyone know of a good book or biography of Cantor? I've always found the way his struggles with mental illness were discussed to be a little ... flip.
"He thought about infinity too much and went CRAZY"
It's reductive, and plays into the mystique and fear-mongering around mathematics. (That acts as a kind of gatekeeping and is bad.) While stigmatizing and abstracting mental illness.
@futurebird i remember learning about cantor with my undergraduate informatics degree. however, learning he has probably been diagnosed with "cyclic manic depression" (bipolar disorder in modern terms) makes me feel more connected considering i know of another historically important person had what i had. thank you for bringing this up and i'll keep an eye out for any good biographies on him.
That all said, I don't think mental illness, & distinct from mental illness but intersecting, neuroatypicality are irrelevant to human creativity & scientific advancement. I would like to know if Cantor was captivated by infinity, in part because of his "melancholy" or was mathematics a way to escape?
It's obvious that without "special interests" we'd know much less about the world. It's good that all minds do not work in the same way, even though atypical thinking can be a struggle. 2/2
@futurebird As a neurodivergent with a mathematics background and side interests in mathematics' intersection with philosophy and history, Cantor has always fascinated me. Inspired by your post, I found an excellent biographical paper, "Towards a biography of Georg Cantor" (1971), covering his life, work, and mental illness in a sensitive yet balanced way:
@futurebird Summary from the paper: "The great influence of Georg Cantor's theory of sets and transfinite arithmetic has led to a considerable interest in his life. It is well known that he had a remarkable and unusual personality, and that he suffered from attacks of mental illness; but the 'popular'' account of his life is richer in falsehood and distortion than in factual content."