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This article lists mathematical properties and laws of sets, involving the set-theoretic operations of union, intersection, and complementation and the relations of set equality and set inclusion. It also provides systematic procedures for evaluating expressions, and performing calculations, involving these operations and relations.
For example, the union of three sets A, B, and C contains all elements of A, all elements of B, and all elements of C, and nothing else. Thus, x is an element of A ∪ B ∪ C if and only if x is in at least one of A, B, and C. A finite union is the union of a finite number of sets; the phrase does not imply that the union set is a finite set ...
Another way to describe collectively exhaustive events is that their union must cover all the events within the entire sample space. For example, events A and B are said to be collectively exhaustive if = where S is the sample space. Compare this to the concept of a set of mutually exclusive events. In such a set no more than one event can ...
So the intersection of the empty family should be the universal set (the identity element for the operation of intersection), [4] but in standard set theory, the universal set does not exist. However, when restricted to the context of subsets of a given fixed set X {\displaystyle X} , the notion of the intersection of an empty collection of ...
The algebra of sets is the set-theoretic analogue of the algebra of numbers. Just as arithmetic addition and multiplication are associative and commutative, so are set union and intersection; just as the arithmetic relation "less than or equal" is reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive, so is the set relation of "subset".
Generalizing the results of these examples gives the principle of inclusion–exclusion. To find the cardinality of the union of n sets: Include the cardinalities of the sets. Exclude the cardinalities of the pairwise intersections. Include the cardinalities of the triple-wise intersections. Exclude the cardinalities of the quadruple-wise ...
This is a stronger condition than the probability of their intersection being zero. If A and B are disjoint events, then P(A ∪ B) = P(A) + P(B). This extends to a (finite or countably infinite) sequence of events. However, the probability of the union of an uncountable set of events is not the sum of their probabilities.
A ring of sets in the order-theoretic sense forms a distributive lattice in which the intersection and union operations correspond to the lattice's meet and join operations, respectively. Conversely, every distributive lattice is isomorphic to a ring of sets; in the case of finite distributive lattices, this is Birkhoff's representation theorem ...