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Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. (This set is sometimes called "the Russell set".) If R is not a member of itself, then its definition entails that it is a member of itself; yet, if it is a member of itself, then it is not a member of itself, since it is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. The ...
Russell's paradox concerns the impossibility of a set of sets, whose members are all sets that do not contain themselves. If such a set could exist, it could neither contain itself (because its members all do not contain themselves) nor avoid containing itself (because if it did, it should be included as one of its members). [2]
Russell recognized that the statement x = x is true for every set, and thus the set of all sets is defined by {x | x = x}. In 1906 he constructed several paradox sets, the most famous of which is the set of all sets which do not contain themselves. Russell himself explained this abstract idea by means of some very concrete pictures.
Russell's paradox shows that the "set of all sets that do not contain themselves", i.e., {x | x is a set and x ∉ x}, cannot exist. Cantor's paradox shows that "the set of all sets" cannot exist. Naïve set theory defines a set as any well-defined collection of distinct elements, but problems arise from the vagueness of the term well-defined.
Cantor's paradox is the name given to a contradiction following from Cantor's theorem together with the assumption that there is a set containing all sets, the universal set. In order to distinguish this paradox from the next one discussed below, it is important to note what this contradiction is.
An operation in set theory that combines the elements of two or more sets to form a single set containing all the elements of the original sets, without duplication. universal universe 1. The universal class, or universe, is the class of all sets. A universal quantifier is the quantifier "for all", usually written ∀ unordered pair
If A is a set, then the absolute complement of A (or simply the complement of A) is the set of elements not in A (within a larger set that is implicitly defined). In other words, let U be a set that contains all the elements under study; if there is no need to mention U, either because it has been previously specified, or it is obvious and unique, then the absolute complement of A is the ...
The empty set is a subset of every set (the statement that all elements of the empty set are also members of any set A is vacuously true). The set of all subsets of a given set A is called the power set of A and is denoted by 2 A {\displaystyle 2^{A}} or P ( A ) {\displaystyle P(A)} ; the " P " is sometimes in a script font: ℘ ( A ...