Moritz Cantor

Moritz Benedikt Cantor

Born: 23 Aug 1829 in Mannheim, Baden (now Germany)
Died: 9 April 1920 in Heidelberg, Germany

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Moritz Cantor worked under Gauss and Stern at Göttingen and studied at Berlin with Dirichlet and Steiner. During a stay in Paris he became friendly with Chasles and Bertrand. In 1853 he was appointed tutor at the University of Heidelberg and he was to remain at Heidelberg all his life.

From 1860 Moritz Cantor lectured on the history of mathematics and is one of the leading German historians of mathematics at the end of the 19th Century. His first significant work was Mathematische Beiträge zum Kulturleben der Völker (1863) (Mathematical Contributions to the Cultural Life of the People) but he is best remembered for the four volume work Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik which traces the history of mathematics up to 1799. The first volume was published in 1880 and the last volume, written with the help of others, appeared in 1908.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. K Bopp, Cantor, M, Deutsches biogrphisches Jahrbuch II (Stuttgart-Berlin-Leipzig, 1928), 509-513. 
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