Goos began flipping through, contemplating the letters with the relish of an archaeologist entering a long-lost tomb. Then he reached a particular page and froze. He struggled to catch his breath.

It wasn’t the handwriting. At this point in his research on Cantor, he’d become accustomed to the strange, nearly indecipherable Gothic script known as kurrentschrift, which Germans used until around 1900.

It wasn’t the signature. He knew that the German mathematician Richard Dedekind had been a key player in Cantor’s quest to understand infinity and solidify math’s foundations, and that the two had exchanged many letters.

It was the date: November 30, 1873.

He’d never seen this letter before. No one had. It was believed to be lost, destroyed in the tumult of World War II or perhaps by Cantor himself.

This was the letter that had the power to rewrite Cantor’s legacy. The letter that proved once and for all that Cantor’s famous 1874 paper, the one that would go on to reshape all of mathematics, had been an act of plagiarism.

Drama in the world of mathematics~~

Posted here before by resident QM fan @0xbitcoiner: #1442413