Mathematical Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy

Abstract:

Trevor wrote three major histories, [62; 63; 64], as well as many mathematical papers in his multi-faceted career and it is a great pleasure for me to dedicate to his memory this oifering on the history and mathematics of the Schröder-Bernstein Theorem, intending that it reflect in a way he might have appreciated those two strands of his scholarly work. The historical material for my essay is gathered from a great variety of published sources and is no doubt known to specialists and to historians of Set Theory, but there is ample evidence that it is not widely known among other mathematicians, many of whom, like myself, use this theorem in their work and routinely present proofs of it to their undergraduate students. It is to these mathematicians that the essay is principally addressed.