Given any element in our universe of discourse we test to see whether it belongs to A or B.

If it belongs
to neither then it will not belong to C. Otherwise it will.

Definition 1: Let A and B be subsets of I. Then by the union of A and B written A U B we mean the set of
all elements which belong to either A or B. In the language of sets:

A U B ={x: x ∈ A or x ∈ B}

Either…or.. is often used in this non-mutually exclusive sense (meaning both)

Definition 2: Let A and B be subsets of I then by the intersection of A and B written A  ∩ B we mean the
set of all elements which belong to both A and B. More symbolically

 A  ∩ B= {x: x ∈ A and x ∈ B}

Definitions 1 and 2 introduce operations on sets which are closed. A set is closed under an operation, if
performing that operation on members of the set produces a member of that set.

This leads to still another reason for introducing the empty set. It is possible for the intersection of two
non-empty sets to be empty.

Whenever we choose a subset of the universe of discourse, we actually choose two subsets.

Definition 3: By the complement of A we mean the set of all elements which belong to the universe of
discourse but do not to A. That is

A’= {x : x ∈ I but x ∉ A}

Remarks: but logically has the same meaning as and.

A’=I ∩ A’

is not surprising since all elements belong to

2) The concept of a complement does not depend on the universal set. However, the complement of a
given set does depend on the universal set. We don’t say that A’ means all non A’s but rather all I’s
which are non A’s.

3) Given any two sets A and B we define the relative complement of A in B written B-A to be all B’s which
are non A’s. That is

B-A={x: x∈B and x ∉ A}

B-A= B∩ A’

We are interested in knowing universally true recipes about sets.

B- Contrast between Addition and union

Since union seems to incorporate the idea of combining sets there is a tendency to associate union with
addition. That is, suppose we have two sets A and B we know the number of members in each set. Say A
has m members and B has n members. Then it is not necessarily that A U B has m+n members.
If X denotes any set, let us use the notation N(x) to denote the number of elements that belongs to X.

A∩ B if any element belongs to both A and B, it contributes 1 to N(A) and 1 to N(B). Each element in A∩
B is counted twice when we form N(A) + N(B)

N(AUB)= N(A) + N(B) – N(A∩ B)

We want to extend these results beyond the intersection and union of two sets.