4 ms·
New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?
- leephillips 9mo ago“Noether, who was Jewish, fled from Germany to the U.S., where she died two years later from cancer” It wasn’t two years, and it wasn’t cancer. These details are unimportant to the (quite interesting) story, but the error is a sign that the author copies information from unreliable secondary sources, which puts the other facts in the article in doubt. I wrote to him about the error when the article first appeared, but received no reply. Noether’s real story is recounted in https://amzn.to/3YZZB4W https://amzn.to/3YZZB4W.
- mymacbook 9mo agoThank you! After Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland's Ars Technica article they published using AI (while saying they didn't), and all the while their article was about an AI agent publishing a hit piece on Scott Shambaugh (matplotlib maintainer), I feel like I now assume journalists are using AI and things need to be fact-checked just as we do for our AI interactions. I appreciate hearing about details like this and getting the source directly. I hope Kristina Armitage and Michael Kanyongolo from Quanta Magazine respond and you can update us! Scott's Blog on Hit Piece: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/ https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... Ars Editor Note: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio... Ars Retraction: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-reje...
- zeroonetwothree 9mo agoIt’s not like journalists were very accurate before AI. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia
- moefh 9mo agoBeing "not very inaccurate" is very different from publishing outright fabricated quotes, which is what Ars Technica did and later admitted to: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...
- monster_truck 9mo agoHad no idea they even did anything. Was waiting for this. Nice to see some consequences and something resembling an attempt at integrity. Now they just need to do something about all of the other writers! With the exception of the science lady, the security guy, and the british car guy, it's indistinguishable from the kind of PR-copy-paste blogspam 'coverage' you'd see from a place that will never have the reputation Ars used to.
- shermantanktop 9mo agoI see what you did there. Turning the page of time, I guess.
- lich_king 9mo agoI have an opinion about the editorial style of Quanta that I don't think it's popular here (judging by how often they get upvoted), but I think it's a symptom of that. They cover science, but the template they consistently follow is a vague title that oversells the premise and then an article filled with human-interest details and appeals to implications. This makes it easy for everyone to follow along and have an opinion, but I feel like science is a distant backdrop and never the actual subject. In this article, what's the one tidbit of scientific knowledge that we gain? Dedekind's and Cantor's work is described only in poetic abstractions ("a wedge he could use to pry open the forbidden gates of infinity"). When the focus is writing a gossip column for eloquent people, precision doesn't matter all that much.
- ajkjk 9mo agoI think your opinion is popular here. Quanta is, while better than nothing, universally disappointing. It seems like it would be much easier for them to do a better job -- write less vaguely, fact-check more, assume the reader is a bit more intelligent.
- johngossman 9mo agoI find they are good at identifying interesting topics and writing articles that don't deliver. They remind me of Omni magazine (which I subscribed to at one point). The articles aren't even wrong.
- rvba 9mo agoThe articles are unreadable fluff
- MichaelDickens 9mo agoIn my experience virtually every magazine is like this, not just Quanta. I open an article hoping to learn something about some scientific or mathematical discovery, but instead the article is almost entirely about the discoverer. For learning about actual discoveries, YouTube is much better (Veritasium, Numberphile, 3Blue1Brown, ...).
- QuesnayJr 9mo agoAre you citing your own book?
- leephillips 9mo agoIt won’t be the last time.
- wizzwizz4 9mo agoIt's best practice to say something like "Noether's real story is recounted in my book [link]". This both establishes you as a subject matter expert, and stops your comments looking like disingenuous grift.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dvt 9mo agoIt's literally cited in his bio, and he's using his real name on HN. It's about as far as grift as it could be. If he's being curt, he's probably (rightfully) frustrated that "journalists" are getting such bottom-of-the-barrel facts wrong.
- tadfisher 9mo agoBut surely you would agree that "my book" just wastes less time all around, and doesn't harm the author's message?
- wizzwizz4 9mo ago> It's about as far as grift as it could be. Indeed. I don't generally give grifters tips on how to disguise themselves.
- fph 9mo agoA bio is not proper disclosure: it is hidden behind a link that you have to click, and it can be changed at any moment without leaving traces.
- 2b3a51 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether Is the wikipedia page more or less correct or in need of editing in your view? (Given that you are probably the current world expert on Noether having written the book)
- ChocMontePy 9mo agoI'm at the library so I checked your book. You said in there: > However, by October 1933, the issue was straightened out and she was aboard the Bremen, sailing for the United States. Since she died on 14 April 1935, it was 18 months rather than 2 years. That sounds like a rather pedantic correction on your part. That pedanticism is a bad sign and puts your "correction" about the cancer in doubt.
- dkarl 9mo ago> In their 1872 papers, though, Cantor and Dedekind had found a way to construct a number line that was complete. No matter how much you zoomed in on any given stretch of it, it remained an unbroken expanse of infinitely many real numbers, continuously linked. > Suddenly, the monstrosity of infinity, long feared by mathematicians, could no longer be relegated to some unreachable part of the number line. It hid within its every crevice. I'm vaguely familiar with some of the mathematics, but I have no idea what this is trying to say. The infinity of the rational numbers had been known a thousand years prior by the Greeks, including by Zeno whom the article already mentioned. The Greeks also knew that some quantities could not be expressed as rational numbers. I would assume the density of irrational numbers was already known as well? Give x < y, it's easy to construct x + (y-x)(sqrt(2))/2. I don't get what "suddenly" became apparent.
- terminalbraid 9mo agoThe density does not dictate cardinality which is what this article is about.
- pfortuny 9mo agoThe continuum. Connectedness.
- zeroonetwothree 9mo agoComplete just means the limit of every sequence is part of the set. So there’s no way to “escape” merely by going to infinity. Rational numbers do not have this property. How to construct the real numbers as a set with that property (and the other usual properties) formally and rigorously took quite a long time to figure out.
- dang 9mo agoI think we can do without the baity title since most HN readers should know who Cantor and Dedekind are. Edit: okay, maybe not Dedekind. If someone wants to suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article itself), we can change it again.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoHard disagree I’ll go out on a limb and say the majority of HN users at this point do not know the context and implications of the impact of Cantor - would probably have only heard the name in the context of mathematics but no deeper I’d go further and say the majority have not ever heard of the name Dedekind
- freehorse 9mo agoI would assume that at least cantors technique of diagonalisation should have found its way into some CS course that I assume a good part of the audience here has studied? Considering that’s what Turing used to prove the undecidability of the halting problem.
- AndrewKemendo 9mo agoHaving been active on this website for 14 years now … At this point I would venture to say The median hacker news commentator does not have aa computer science degree
- tchalla 9mo ago> since most HN readers should know who Cantor and Dedekind are. Show up with your hands here if you didn’t know either Cantor or Dedekind.
- jacquesm 9mo agoThen you can just skip this submission and nobody will be the wiser.
- renewiltord 9mo agoThis whole plagiarism thing is too overwrought these days. People discuss stuff and the idea forms in the discussion between the two. Then one writes it up. Oh he plagiarized the other. I don’t know man.
- readthenotes1 9mo agoTry reading the article? And you don't like giving credit to people that help you? You may be successful by some measures, but not by the more important ones
- renewiltord 9mo agoHaha, the sanctimony is really too much.
- shermantanktop 9mo agoI’ve been in joint discussions where “the idea forming” was really one party thinking out loud and doing almost all the work, and the other providing approximately the same function as a rubber duck. Sometimes the one doing the heavy lifting is me; sometimes it’s the other person, and I’m happy to make squeaky rubber duck noises that help. And with some people we have switched roles, even during the conversation. And perception will not track with reality because we’re all the hero of our own story. Very hard to assign credit after the fact without a verbatim transcript, which written letters provide here.
- QuesnayJr 9mo agoFrom 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.
- cls59 9mo agoIf 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.
- QuesnayJr 9mo agoI 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.
- AdAbsurdum 9mo agoI 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.
- ozb 9mo agoeh this "plagiarism" framing is overreaching there were two proofs in the paper: countability of algebraic numbers and uncountability of reals countability of algebraic numbers is a rather trivial induction on countability of rationals/pairs of numbers, which Cantor already knew about Cantor himself did prove uncountability of real numbers; Dedekind just helped him clean the proof up to me it seems like Dedekind's assistance was the kind of thing that might merit an acknowledgement, or possibly even joint authorship if subspecialty norms are generous, but far from a novel contribution on its own; unlike the uncountability of reals which was genuinely important and nontrivial. Dedekind, like Cantor, had other very important contributions, but certainly no claim on what Cantor is known for; and the context with Kronecker meant that this would prevent the work from ever being published. Also, this article doesn't actually show Dedekind was specifically upset by the "plagiarism", there may be any number of other reasons they may have stopped corresponding; and Dedekind's "hope this is useful" comment to Cantor can be read as permission to use it for his purposes
- ferfumarma 9mo agoWhat a strange interpretation. As you mention: Dedekind stopped corresponding with him after the publication, but also began keeping a copy of every letter he sent to Cantor. Sure it's circumstantial, but it's exactly what you would do when you're the victim of a plagiarist. In my eyes the burden of proof has been met.
- globular-toast 9mo agoWhat is this? You used a semicolon (albeit incorrectly) but struggle with full stops? Why are you writing like this?
- effed3 9mo agoGiving no credits on a "co-author" is a bit different than plagiarize (a theft). It's reasonable to suppose than both authors can have reach results indipendently, given enough time, working on the same matter, maybe Dedekind before Cantor? Probably Cantor has the core ideas in it's mind, and Deedekind's arguments was similar enough to push him proced. Sure Dedeking has given a (big) contribution, but the core concept is from Cantor
- effed3 9mo ago>> Suddenly, the monstrosity of infinity, long feared by mathematicians, could no longer be relegated to some unreachable part of the number line. It hid within its every crevice. Exageration, the quite mayority of mathematician live very well with infinity, just handle with care.