  What is known as "Hilbert's hotel" is a story of an imaginary hotel with
infinitely many rooms that illustrates the bizarre consequences of assuming an
actual infinity of objects or events. Since the 1970s it has been used in a
variety of arguments, some of them relating to cosmology and others to
philosophy and theology. For a long time it has remained unknown whether David
Hilbert actually proposed the thought experiment named after him, or whether it
was merely a piece of mathematical folklore. It turns out that Hilbert
introduced his hotel in a lecture of January 1924, but without publishing it.
The counter-intuitive hotel only became better known in 1947, when George Gamow
described it in a book, and it took nearly three more decades until it
attracted wide interest in scientific, philosophical, and theological contexts.
The paper outlines the origin and early history of Hilbert's hotel paradox. At
the same time it retracts the author's earlier conclusion that the paradox was
originally due to Gamow.
