Comment by QuesnayJr
7 hours ago
From the article it's hard to tell if Cantor really did plagiarize (though it seems Dedekind thought he did).
According to the article, Cantor proved the theorem first and sent it to Dedekind. Dedekind suggested a simplification of the proof, which Cantor used when he wrote it up. The story doesn't make Cantor look good, but if the original proof by Cantor is correct, then the credit for the theorem still basically belongs to Cantor.
If I understand the article correctly, that second proof was published as a rider on a first proof that was entirely Dedekind's. So, there was definitely a credit owed at time of publishing.
I came away with the impression that the biggest villain in this story was Kronecker. Without the need to tiptoe around his ego and gatekeeping, these results may have been published as a paper with joint authorship.
I read it the other way. Here's the quote from the article:
On December 7, 1873, he wrote to Dedekind that he thought he’d finally succeeded: “But if I should be deceiving myself, I should certainly find no more indulgent judge than you.” He laid out his proof. But it was unwieldy, convoluted. Dedekind replied with a way to simplify Cantor’s proof, building a clearer argument without losing any rigor or accuracy. Meanwhile Cantor, before he’d received Dedekind’s letter, sent him a similar idea for how to streamline the proof, though he hadn’t worked out the details the way Dedekind had.
I think the relevant quotes are these:
"Dedekind quickly replied that...he’d worked out a proof that the algebraic numbers (the numbers you get as solutions to algebra problems) could be counted.
[...]
Weierstrass had been most excited about the proof that algebraic numbers are countable. (He would later use that result to prove a theorem of his own.) So Cantor chose a misleading title [for his paper] that only mentioned algebraic numbers.
[...]
Writing his paper, Cantor put the proof about algebraic numbers first. Below it, he added his own proof that the real numbers cannot be counted — Dedekind’s simplified version of it, that is."
So the first proof -- the one the article was titled after -- was completely created by Dedekind.