The first tremors that Cantor felt came from his colleagues. In France, Poincaré grew disgusted with set theory, which he thought pathological: he wrote that later generations would regard Cantor’s work as a disease from which they had recovered. Closer to home, Kronecker, the most powerful figure in the German mathematical establishment, had been opposed to Cantor’s ideas from the beginning, calling the work humbug and the man himself a charlatan and corrupter of youth.
