Burali-Forti paradox

Meaning

Proper Noun

• The paradox that supposing the existence of a set of all ordinal numbers leads to a contradiction; construed as meaning that it is not a properly defined set.

Origin

• Named after Cesare Burali-Forti, who in 1897 published a paper proving a theorem which, unknown to him, contradicted a previously proved result by Georg Cantor.