Comment by ozb

eh 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