The basic concepts of set theory are set and membership. A set is thought of as any collection of objects, called the members (or elements) of the set. In mathematics, the members of sets are any mathematical objects, and in particular can themselves be sets. Thus one speaks of the set N of natural numbers {0,1,2,3,4,...}, the set of real numbers, and the set of functions from the natural numbers to the natural numbers; but also, for example, of the set {0,2,N} which has as members the numbers 0 and 2 and the set N.
Initially, what is now known as "naive" or "intuitive" set theory was developed. (See Naive set theory). As it turned out, assuming that one could perform any operations on sets without restriction led to paradoxes such as Russell's paradox. To address these problems, set theory had to be re-constructed, this time using an axiomatic approach.
The important idea of Cantor's, which got set theory going as a new field of study, was to define two sets A and B to have the same number of members (the same cardinality) when there is a way of pairing off members of A exhaustively with members of B. Then the set N of natural numbers has the same cardinality as the set Q of rational numbers (they are both said to be countably infinite), even though N is a proper subset of Q. On the other hand, the set R of real numbers does not have the same cardinality as N or Q, but a larger one (it is said to be uncountable). Cantor gave two proofs that R is not countable, and the second of these, using what is known as the diagonal construction, has been extraordinarily influential and has had manifold applications in logic and mathematics.
Cantor went right ahead and constructed infinite hierarchies of infinite sets, the ordinal and cardinal numbers. This was considered controversial in his day, with the opposition led by the finitist Leopold Kronecker[?], but there is no significant disagreement among mathematicians today that Cantor had the right idea.
Cantor's development of set theory was still "naïve" in the sense that he didn't have a precise axiomatization in mind. In retrospect, we can say that Cantor was tacitly using the axiom of extension, the axiom of infinity, and the axiom schema of (unrestricted) comprehension. However, the last of these leads directly to Russell's paradox, by constructing the set S := {A : A is not in A} of all sets that don't belong to themselves. (If S belongs to itself, then it does not, giving a contradiction, so S must not belong to itself. But then S must belong to itself, giving a final and absolute contradiction.) Therefore, set theorists were forced to abandon either classical logic or unrestricted comprehension, and the latter was far more reasonable to most. (Although intuitionism had a significant following, the paradox still goes through with intuitionistic logic. There is no paradox in Brazilian logic[?], but that was almost completely unknown at the time.)
In order to avoid this and similar paradoxes, Ernst Zermelo put forth a system of axioms for set theory in 1908. He included in this system the axiom of choice, a truly controversial axiom that he needed to prove the well ordering theorem. This system was later refined by Adolf Fraenkel[?] and Thoralf Skolem[?], giving the axioms used today.
The axioms for set theory now most often studied and used, although put in their final form by Skolem, are called the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms (ZF). Actually, this term usually excludes the axiom of choice, which was once more controversial than it is today. When this axiom is included, the resulting system is called ZFC.
An important feature of ZFC is that every object that it deals with is a set. In particular, every element of a set is itself a set. Other familiar mathematical objects, such as numbers, must be subsequently defined in terms of sets.
The nine axioms of ZFC are listed below. (Strictly speaking, the axioms of ZFC are just strings of logical symbols. What follows should therefore be viewed only as an attempt to express the intended meaning of these axioms in English.) Each axiom has further information in its own article.
The axioms of choice and regularity are still controversial today among a minority of mathematicians.
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