Cantor and the French. Mathematics, philosophy and the infinite. Transl. from the French by Klaus Volkert (Q990371)

``Je le vois, mais je ne le crois pas.'' This sentence, so we are told, was written by Cantor to Dedekind when he became aware of a one-to-one mapping between a line segment and a square (p. 197). Does Cantor's choice of the foreign language indicate a special relation between Cantor and the French? In the first place, the reactions of the towering French mathematicians did not support such a relation. C. Hermite and others found the just mentioned result, and many other of Cantor's philosophical reasonings, very abstract and rather useless. In a nutshell we see here the opposing attitudes of German geist and French esprit (to use Cantor's wording); by the way, in music Gustav Mahler could challenge a comparison with this French spirit. From a philosophical viewpoint the sections ``Idealism and Realism with Cantor'' and ``The nature of mathematics consists in their freedom'' (pp. 83-95) of chapter 4 dealing with general applications of set theory and its consequences are extremely interesting. The book is written in a more or less ``non-mathematical'' style; nevertheless it supposes a reader with a good knowledge of the development of Cantor's set theory. Some addenda are intended to fill any mathematical gaps (pp. 193-203). An exception is the chapter on the Goldbach Conjecture which definitely demands a mathematical background. By the way, the related boxes of these and other manuscripts are not lost in World War II (p. 1) but later in the very cold winter after the war due to the quartering of soldiers. The author gives a broad view embedded especially in philosophy, theology, politics, and even occultism with many details in order to report how Cantor's pathbreaking theory was regarded warily in France, although France may only serve as an example of the reception of such revolutionary ideas (countries such as Great Britain and Italy would also be interesting). Furthermore, we are informed about Cantor's fights for durable international relations in mathematics. The last chapter contains letters with French correspondents. We have larger editions of Cantor's correspondence (Meschkowski/Nilson and Tapp) but there is no complete one yet. In this respect, these annotated 37 letters written in the decade from 1886 to 1896 are of interest, as are the included facsimiles of Cantor's drafts. Among les Cantoriens, i.e., French mathematicians with a Cantorian stance (as Hermite put it), we have \textit{L. Couturat} who wrote an interesting book ``L'infini mathématique'' (Paris 1896; JFM 27.0049.10) in which he praised Cantor as ``un subtil et profond mathématicien'' who gave the best answer with respect to the infinite and which he finally sent to Cantor with a dedication (now in the Library of the University of Halle). In general, Couturat is not mentioned very much in papers and books concerning Cantor, but in this book Couturat should have been mentioned at any rate. Finally, the book contains an extensive bibliography (pp. 205-225) and an index of names. For the review of the French edition see [``Cantor et la France'' Paris: Éditions Kimé. (2008; Zbl 1185.01029)].