Pavel Florensky

Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, inventor and polymath, born in 1882 in Yevlakh, in what is now Azerbaijan, to a railroad engineer. After a religious crisis in 1899 he decided to develop theories that would reconcile the spiritual and the scientific visions on the basis of mathematics, entered the department of mathematics of the Imperial Moscow University, studied under Nikolai Bugaev and was particularly drawn to Georg Cantor's set theory. He died in 1937 and is called a neomartyr and folk saint, although it was later firmly noted that the Russian Orthodox Church has made no decision recognising him as a saint.