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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 ...
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 ...
The combined region of the two sets is called their union, denoted by A ∪ B, where A is the orange circle and B the blue. The union in this case contains all living creatures that either are two-legged or can fly (or both). The region included in both A and B, where the two sets overlap, is called the intersection of A and B, denoted by A ∩ B.
In constructive mathematics, "not empty" and "inhabited" are not equivalent: every inhabited set is not empty but the converse is not always guaranteed; that is, in constructive mathematics, a set that is not empty (where by definition, "is empty" means that the statement () is true) might not have an inhabitant (which is an such that ).
It is easy to show that if a union-closed family contains a singleton {} (as in the example above), then the element must occur in at least half of the sets of the family. If there is a counterexample to the conjecture, then there is also a counterexample consisting only of finite sets. Therefore, without loss of generality, we will assume that ...
In mathematics, the disjoint union (or discriminated union) of the sets A and B is the set formed from the elements of A and B labelled (indexed) with the name of the set from which they come. So, an element belonging to both A and B appears twice in the disjoint union, with two different labels.
For example, a well-studied invariant is the smallest cardinality of a collection of meagre sets of reals whose union is the entire real line. These are invariants in the sense that any two isomorphic models of set theory must give the same cardinal for each invariant.