Cantor was born in St Petersburg, Russia. His father had a Jewish-Danish, his mother an Austrian background. His father was a Protestant. He was a rich merchant. His mother was a Roman Catholic. She was very artistic. When his father became ill in 1856 the family moved to Frankfurt. Georg went to private schools and then to gymnasien in Darmstadt and Wiesbaden. He soon showed that he was brilliant at maths. His father wanted him to be an engineer but Georg persuaded him to let him study mathematics. He spent a short time studying at the University of Zürich, but soon went to Berlin where he studied physics, philosophy and mathematics. He was very influenced by the teaching of Weierstrass, Kummer and Kronecker, who were later to become his enemies. He wrote a doctoral thesis in which he said that asking questions was more important than finding the answers. He was talking about a problem that Carl Friedrich Gauss had left unanswered.