In Judaism and Christianity, an official in charge of music or chants. In Judaism the azzan (cantor) leads liturgical prayer and chanting. In medieval Christianity the cantor had charge of a cathedral's music specifically, of supervising the choir's singing. The term also designated the head of a college of church music
{i} synagogue official who conducts the liturgical part of a service; conductor of a church choir
orig. Edward Israel Iskowitz born Jan. 31, 1892, New York, N.Y., U.S. died Oct. 10, 1964, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Calif. U.S. comedian and singer. As a child, Cantor clowned and sang for coins on street corners in his native New York City. He dropped out of elementary school, could not keep a job because of his irrepressible clowning, and soon went into vaudeville as a blackface song-and-dance man. He toured with Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies and the Shuberts. He appeared in several Broadway reviews, and from 1923 to 1926 he was a star in Kid Boots. From 1931 Cantor performed for 18 years on The Chase and Sanborn Hour as a standup comedian. His films include Roman Scandals (1933) and Strike Me Pink (1936). In the 1950s he hosted a television show
born March 3, 1845, St. Petersburg, Russia died Jan. 6, 1918, Halle, Ger. German mathematician, founder of set theory. He was the first to examine number systems, such as the rational numbers and the real numbers, systematically as complete entities, or sets. This led him to the surprising discovery that not all infinite sets are the same size. In particular, he showed that the rational numbers could be put in a one-to-one correspondence with the counting numbers; hence the set is countable. He also showed that no such correspondence is possible for the much larger set of irrational numbers; hence they are known as an uncountable set. His investigations led him to the classification of transfinite numbers, which are, informally speaking, degrees of infinity