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Here we briefly review some minimal background knowledge that we will assume in the rest of the book. Besides a small amount of that nebulous quality called "mathematical maturity", we only expect some basic concepts from set theory and mathematical indiction. The reader who is familiar with these concepts can safely skip on to the next chapter.
We denote the set of natural numbers by . There is some inconsistency in the mathematical literature as to whether belongs to the natural numbers or not: some authors choose to include it, other do not. For our purposes it is convenient to include as a natural number. Other number sets which will be of importance to us include the sets of integers , positive integers , rational numbers , positive rational numbers , real numbers , and positive real numbers .
The product of the first positive integers turns up in many mathematical situations. It is therefore convenient to have a more compact notation for it. We accordingly define and , for . We read as ' factorial'. The definition of as is not supposed to carry any intuitive meaning: it is simply a useful convention.
By a set we intuitively mean a collection of objects of any nature (numbers, people, concepts, sets themselves, etc.) that is considered as a single entity. The objects in that collection are called elements of the set. If an object is an element of a set , we denote that fact by
otherwise we write
We also say that is a member of the set or that belongs to . If a set has finitely many elements (here we rely on your intuition of what finite is), we can describe it precisely by listing all of them, for example:
We often rely on our common intuition and use ellipses, as in
We sometimes go further and use the same for infinite sets; for example, the set of natural numbers can be specified as
Further we will discuss a more universal method of describing sets.
Two sets are declared equal if and only if they have the same elements. In other words, the sets and are equal, denoted as usual by , if every element of is an element of and every element of is an element of . For example, the sets and are equal, and so are the sets , and .
A set is a subset of a set , denoted , if every element of is an element of . If , we also say that is included in , or that contains . For example, . Note that every set is a subset of itself.
The following facts are very useful. They are direct consequences of the definitions of equality and containment of sets.
A set is a proper subset of a set , denoted or , if and . In other words, is a proper subset of if is a subset of and is not a subset of , i.e. if at least one element of is not in . In particular, no set is a proper subset of itself. If is not a proper subset of , we denote that by .
Amongst all sets there is one that is particularly special. That is the empty set, i.e. the set that has no elements. By definition of equality of sets, there is only one empty set. One might think that the empty set is a useless abstraction. On the contrary, it is a very important set, and probably the most commonly used one in mathematics (like the number 0 is the most commonly used number). That is why it has a special notation: .
We cannot always list the elements of a set, even if it is finite, so we need a more universal method for specifying sets. The commonly used method is to describe the property that determines membership of the set, e.g.:
" is the set of all objects such that ."
where "" is a certain property (predicate) involving . We use the following convenient notation, called the set-builder notation for the set described above:
Here are some examples:
Sometimes, we use the set-builder notation more liberally and, for instance, describe the set of rational numbers as or the set of positive real numbers as .
We describe below the basic operations on sets.
consisting of all elements that are both in and in . If , then and are called disjoint.
consisting of all elements that are in at least one of and .
consisting of all elements that are in but not in . An alternative notation for is .
For example, if and then , , and .
Often, all sets that we consider are subsets of one set, called the domain of discourse. We also call that set the universe or the universal set. For example, in arithmetic, the universe is usually the set of natural numbers or the set of integers, while in algebra and calculus, the universe is the set of real numbers; talking about humans, the universe is the set of all humans, etc.
Let a universal set be fixed and . The complement of (with respect to ) is the set
The complement of a set is sometimes also denoted by .
Thus, the complement of consists of those objects from the universal set that do not belong to . For example, if the universal set is , then the complement of the interval is ; the complement of is the set of irrational numbers.
The power set of a set is the set of all subsets of :
In order to introduce the next operation we need the notion of ordered pair. Let , be any objects. Intuitively, the ordered pair of and , denoted (do not confuse this with an open interval of real numbers!), is something like a set consisting of as a first element (or first component) and as a second element (or second component). Thus, if , then the ordered pair is different from the ordered pair and each of these is different from the set because the elements of a set are not ordered. In particular, the ordered pair is different from the set . Here is a formal definition of an ordered pair as a set that satisfies the intuition:
Given the objects and , the ordered pair is the set .
Here is the fundamental property of ordered pairs:
The ordered pairs and are equal if and only if and .
Proof:
Exercise.
The Cartesian product of the sets and is the set
consisting of all ordered pairs where the first component comes from and the second component comes from . In particular, we denote by and call it the Cartesian square of .
For example, if , then
while
Note that if or is empty, then is empty too. Moreover, if has elements and has elements, then has elements (why?). This is one of the reasons for the term "product".
The Cartesian coordinate system in the plane is a representation of the plane as the Cartesian1 square of the real line , where we associate a unique ordered pair of real numbers (its coordinates) with every point in the plane.
The notion of an ordered pair can be generalized to ordered -tuple-tuple, for any . An -tuple is an object of the type where the order of the components matters. We will not give a formal set theoretic definition in the style of Definition 1.2.1, but leave this as an exercise (Exercise 11).
Accordingly, the Cartesian product can be extended to sets:
As before, we will use the notation for .
Relations, also called predicates, are ubiquitous in mathematics. Relations between numbers like "being equal", "being less than" and "being divisible by" come to mind at once. As these examples indicate, many of the relations we commonly encounter are binary, i.e., relations relating two objects at a time. It will be convenient for us to identify a binary relation with the set of all ordered pairs of elements that stand in that relation. We thus have the following definition:
A binary relation on a set is any subset of .
For example the relation on the...
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