It takes an inhuman force of character to make the beds while your house is falling down. At the same time that Cantor was trying desperately and unsuccessfully to prove the Continuum Hypothesis (if his theory couldn’t even locate the cardinality of the reals in the hierarchy of the alephs, what good was it?), he went about the beginner’s business of learning how to do arithmetic—but this time with transfinite cardinal numbers: the most radical extension of the franchise we have seen.
