Page "Georg Cantor" Paragraph 8

Cantor was promoted to Extraordinary Professor in 1872 and made full Professor in 1879.

To attain the latter rank at the age of 34 was a notable accomplishment, but Cantor desired a chair at a more prestigious university, in particular at Berlin, at that time the leading German university.

However, his work encountered too much opposition for that to be possible.

Kronecker, who headed mathematics at Berlin until his death in 1891, became increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect of having Cantor as a colleague, perceiving him as a " corrupter of youth " for teaching his ideas to a younger generation of mathematicians.

Worse yet, Kronecker, a well-established figure within the mathematical community and Cantor's former professor, disagreed fundamentally with the thrust of Cantor's work.

Kronecker, now seen as one of the founders of the constructive viewpoint in mathematics, disliked much of Cantor's set theory because it asserted the existence of sets satisfying certain properties, without giving specific examples of sets whose members did indeed satisfy those properties.

Cantor came to believe that Kronecker's stance would make it impossible for Cantor ever to leave Halle.