Fundamentals

Abstract

In everyday English, the word ‘set’ is used in phrases such as ‘a set of spanners’, ‘a geometry set’ or ‘a set of rules’ and similarly, in mathematics and computing, a set is simply a collection of objects of the same type. One way of defining a set is to list all members or elements of that set. For example,

{Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday}

is the set of the days of the week. When defining a set by listing its elements, the elements themselves are separated by commas and the total collection of elements is surrounded by special parentheses, { and }. The order of the elements is unimportant and each element must only be listed once. Two sets are equal if and only if they contain exactly the same elements.