Skip to main content
Logo image

Chapter 5 Sets

We use the word set every day — a set of books, a set of dishes, a set of rules. In mathematics, we often need to state exactly which objects are part of a problem. We already discussed an important mathematical set — the set of integers, even though we did not use the word set.
We formally define the term set and give different ways to describe sets. We introduce notation for membership in a set and for stating when two sets are equal. We also give symbols for special sets such as the empty set and the set of integers.