In mathematics, the Cantor set is a set of points lying on a single line segment that has a number of unintuitive properties. It was discovered in 1874 by Henry John Stephen Smith and mentioned by German mathematician Georg Cantor in 1883.
Through consideration of this set, Cantor and others helped lay the foundations of modern point-set topology. The most common construction is the Cantor ternary set, built by removing the middle third of a line segment and then repeating the process with the remaining shorter segments. Cantor mentioned this ternary construction only in passing, as an example of a perfect set that is nowhere dense (, Anmerkungen zu §10, /p. 590).
More generally, in topology, a Cantor space is a topological space homeomorphic to the Cantor ternary set (equipped with its subspace topology). By a theorem of L. E. J. Brouwer, this is equivalent to being perfect, nonempty, compact, metrizable and zero dimensional.
Construction and formula of the ternary set
The Cantor ternary set ...