ABSTRACT
Lacan seeks to indicate the order of such a find by citing the case of the nineteenth century mathematician Georg Cantor, and his discovery of the transfinite numbers. In naming him Lacan is well aware that in the aftermath of his find Cantor spent much time in psychiatric institutions. Cantor went on to postulate his famous continuum hypothesis. The effect of the continuum hypothesis is to ground the production of these pure transfinite numbers in what is taken to already exist, this being the familiar territory of the natural, the grounding of which is given by perceptual intuition. Cantor made several attempts to prove his continuum hypothesis. He failed, and the effort seems to have caused him considerable distress. As one mathematician puts it, a model of a theory “interprets the language of the theory in such a way that the axioms of the theory are true in the model.”.
