Sets

Set: A well-defined collection of objects.

Elements or members.

Example: The set of all people living in 3 Basil Close, Liverpool.

"belongs to" or "is an element of"

How to define a set?

1) List or enumerate the elements of the set. Roster notation.

2) Set-builder notation. Specify a rule.

"A is the set of all such that..."

Roster notation:

Set-builder notation:

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There are four-sided shapes which are not parallelograms.

"P is a subset of Q."

Every element of P is an element of Q.

"Q is a superset of P."

Example:

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Equality of sets: Two sets are equal when they have exactly the same

elements.

Null (empty) set has no elements in it.

For any set ,

Universal set: A set which contains everything, depending on the context.

Example: Countries in the European Union.

China

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Venn Diagrams: A way to visualise relations between sets.

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A country is either in the EU or it's not.

Cardinality of a set: The number of elements in it.

Set operations

Complement of a set:

If is a set, then the set of all the elements that don't belong to is called

the complement of

Union:

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 A B
5
1 3
4
2 6

Intersection:

For any two sets A and B, such that

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For any two sets A and B, if then A and B are disjoint.

Mutually exclusive.

Difference

"A difference B"

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 A B

Partition

• are pairwise disjoint.

form a partition of the universal set

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De Morgan's laws

Example:

A B

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Example:

A B

Distributive laws

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is the set of all non Rolls Royce cars.

means that there are no pink Rolls Royce cars.

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 N

All the differently shaded sets are pairwise disjoint and

form a partition of

Like a jigsaw puzzle.

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Have a set with three elements Look at all the subsets of

Look at something simpler.

How many subsets does have?

purely a subset

is a subset or equal to.

has two subsets.

Look at something a little less simple.

How many subsets does have?

Subsets of

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Have a set with three elements Look at all the subsets of

What are all the subsets of

Subsets of

Eight subsets in total.

• For any set

• The set of all subsets of a set A is called its power set, and it's denoted

as

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• For any countable set with cardinality

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