Aleph One Limited

Aleph One

The company was started in 1971, by Laurie van Someren, who picked the name Aleph One, because he wanted a non-specific name for the company.

Aleph is the name of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. A German mathematician active in the mid-19th century, Georg Cantor (1845-1918), realised that infinities came in different sizes; more precisely he showed that the infinite set of all integers was smaller than the infinite set of all real numbers, and gave the labels Aleph Null to the smaller, and Aleph One to the larger set.

J W Dauben, writing in Scientiic American, June 1983, 112-121, said 'The choice (of Aleph as a label for transfinite sets) was particularly clever, as Cantor was pleased to admit, because the Hebrew Aleph was also a symbol for the number 1. Since the transfinite cardinals were themselves infinite unities, the Aleph could be taken to represent a new beginning for mathematics.'

The concept of Alephs is the subject of a successful book by Amir D Aczel called THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH. Paperback about £10 in the UK, ISBN 0-7434-2299-6 (We do not sell it)

Last Updated: 2002.10.30