Set Theory Lecture Notes

Math 214

Prepared by

Ronald Ryan G. Olarte

Mathematics Department

Ateneo de Davao University

School year 2010-2011
 Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Elementary Logic

1. Statement and their connectives

2. Tautology, Implication, and Equivalence
3. Contradiction
4. Deductive reasoning
5. Quantification rules
6. Proof of Validity
7. Mathematical induction

Chapter 2 The Concepts of Sets

1. Sets and Subsets

2. Specification of Sets
3. Unions and Intersections
4. Complements
5. Venn Diagrams
6. Indexed Families and Sets
7. The Russell Paradox

Chapter 3 Relations and Functions

1. Cartesian Product of Two Sets

2. Relations
3. Partitions and Equivalence Relations
4. Functions
5. Images and Inverse Images of Sets
6. Injective, Surjective, and Bijective Functions
7. Composition of Functions

Chapter 4
Statements and their Connectives

Statement/Proposition – a declarative sentence that is either true or false, but not both
simultaneously.

Example 1. Each of the following is a statement

a) Davao is a city in the state of Florida.

b) 2+1 is 5.
c) The digit in the 105th decimal place in the decimal expansion of 3 is 7.
d) The moon is made of blue cheese.
e) There is no intelligent life on Mars.
f) It is raining.

Example 2. None of the following is a statement, because it makes no sense to ask if any of them
is true or false.

a) Come to our party!

b) The sky is rich.
c) How are you today?
d) Goodbye, honey?

Simple statement – is a statement with a subject and a predicate.

Compound statement – is made up of simple propositions connected by the logical operators
(and, or, if-then, if and only if.)

Note: In the study of logic we use small alphabet letters (also known as propositional variables)
to represent statements. A letter such as p may represent either a simple statement or a
compound statement. Unless otherwise stated, we shall use capital letters P, Q, R, … to
represent compound statements.

Connectives/Logical Operators: There are many ways of connecting statements such as p,q,r,
… to form compound statements, but only five are used frequently. These five common
connectives are: a)“not” symbolized by ~ b)“and” symbolized by  c)“or” symbolized by  d)
“if…then…” symbolized by  e)“…if and only if…” symbolized by 
Definition 1: Let p be statement. Then the statement ~p, read “not p” or “the negation of p” or
“it is not the case that” or “it is not true that,” is true whenever the statement p is false and is
false whenever p is true (the truth of ~p depends upon the truth of p). It is convenient to record
this dependency in a truth table:

Table 1
P ~p
T F
F T

Example: let p be the statement “this is an easy course,” then its negation ~p represents “this is
not an easy course”

Definition 2: The connective  may be placed between any two statements p and q to form the
compound statement p  q whose truth values are given in the following truth table.

Table 2
P Q pq
T T T
T F F
F T F
F F F

The statement “p and q” denoted by p  q is called the conjunction of p and q. The statements p
and q are called conjuncts.

Note: Other words that can be used in place of “and” are moreover, although, still, furthermore,
also, nevertheless, however, yet, and but. A comma and semicolon between two statements may
also stand for “and”.

Example: The proposition “He is the only begotten son yet He humbled himself by dying on the
cross to save us” can be symbolized by h  d, h represents the statement “He is the only begotten
son”, d represents “He humbled himself by dying on the cross to save us” and the logical
operator  represents the connective yet.

Definition 3: The connective  may be placed between any two statements p and q to form the
compound statement p  q. The truth values of p  q are defined by table 3, thus  is defined to
be the inclusive. The statement “p or q or both” denoted by p  q is called the disjunction of p
and q. The statements p and q are called disjuncts. “p unless q” is another expression of
disjunction.
Table 3
p q p q
T T T
T F T
F T T
F F F
Example: The statement “I will go unless you let me stay.” Is an inclusive disjunction which
can be symbolized by i  y, i represents the statement “I will go”, y represents “you let me stay”
and  the logical operator or.

Definition 4: The connective  is called the conditional and may be placed between any two
statements p and q to form the compound statement p  q (read: “if p then q”) called an
implication or a conditional statement. p is called the antecedent, premise or hypothesis whereas
q is called the conclusion or consequent. Truth values of p  q are given in table 4.

Table 4
p Q pq
T T T
T F F
F T T
F F T

Note: Other ways if expressing “if p then q” are: a) p implies q, b) p only if q, c) p is sufficient
condition for q, d) q is a necessary condition for p, e) q if p, g) q follows from p, h) q provided p,
i) q whenever p, j) q is logical consequence of p. By definition the statement p  q is equivalent
to the statement ~(p  ~q)

Definition 4.1: let p and q be propositional variables

a) The conditional statement q  p is called the converse of the implication p  q.
b) The conditional statement ~q  ~p is the contrapositive of the implication p  q.
c) The conditional statement ~p  ~q is the inverse of the implication p  q

Example: The statement “if x = 1, then x 2 = 1, can be symbolized as p  q, p represents x = 1

and q represents x 2 = 1. The converse of the implication is “if x 2 = 1, then x = 1”. The
contrapositive of the implication is “if x 2  1 , then x = 1.” The inverse of the implication is “if
x  1 , then x 2  1 .”

Definition 5: the connective  is called the biconditional and may be placed between any two
propositions p and q to form the compound statement p  q (read: “p if and only if q”) called the
material equivalence or biconditional of two statements p and q. The truth values of p  q are
given in table 5.

Table 5
p q pq
T T T
T F F
F T F
 F F T

Note: Biconditional statement can be expressed by “p is a necessary and sufficient condition for
q” and by “p is materially equivalent to q.” The abbreviation iff is used for if and only if. The
material equivalence can also be written in propositional form as (p  q)  (q  p).

Example: In geometry we learned that “a necessary and sufficient condition for a triangle to be
equilateral is that it is equiangular,” this can also be expressed as “a triangle is equilateral iff it is
equiangular” can be symbolized as p  q, where p represents “a triangle is equilateral” and q
represents “it is equiangular.”

Defintion 6: When two statements p and q, simple or compound, have the same truth values in
each of all the logical possibilities, then p is said to be logically equivalent or simply equivalent
to q, and we write p  q .

Tautology, Implication, and Equivalence

Definition 7: A statement is said to be a tautology provided that it is true in each of all logical
possibilities.

Let p and q be statements, compound or simple. If the conditional statement p  q is a

tautology, it is called an implication and is denoted by p  q (read: p implies q). If the
biconditional statement p  q happens to be a tautology, it is called an equivalence and is
denoted by p  q (read: p is equivalent to q)

Definition 8: A Statement is said to be a contradiction or absurdity provided that it is false in

each of all logical possibilities.

Definition 9: A contingency is proposition which is neither a tautology nor a contradiction.

The proper use of parenthesis, brace, or bracket as grouping marks:

1. The parenthesis is used whenever the word “both” goes with “and”, and “either” goes
with “or”. The representation of the following phrases are:

a) Both p or q and r: ( p  q)  r
b) p or both q and r: p  (q  r )
c) Either p and q or r ( p  q)  r
d) p and either q or r: p  (q  r )
 2. Since “neither p nor q” is the same as “not either p or q”, then it is denoted by ~ ( p  q) .
This is also expressed by the phrase “both p and q are not”

3. The order of the words “both” and “not” should also be taken into consideration. Thus,
the representation of the following phrases are:
a) p and q are not both: ~ ( p  q)
b) p and q are both not: ~ p ~ q

Rules of Inferences
Theorems 1 through 6 are very useful tools for justifying logical equivalences and implications

Theorem 1. Let p and q be any two statements. Then

a) Law of addition (Add.): p pq

pq p
b) Law of Simplification (Simp.):
pq q

c) Disjunctive Syllogism (D.S.): ( p  q)  ~ p  q

Theorem 2. Let p and q be any two statements. Then

a) Law of Double Negation (D.N.): p  ~ p(~ p )

( p  q)  ( q  p)
b) Commutative Laws (Com.):
( p  q)  ( q  p)

p  ( p  p)
c) Laws of Idempotency (Idemp.):
p  ( p  p)

d) Contrapositive Law (Contrap.): p  q  ~ q ~ p

Theorem3. (De Morgan’s Laws (De M.)). Let p and q be any two statements. Then
~ ( p  q )  r  (~ p  ~ q ) and ~ ( p  q )  r  (~ p  ~ q ) .

Theorem 4. Let p, q and r be any statements. Then

( p  q)  r  p  ( q  r )
a) Associative Laws (Assoc.):
( p  q)  r  p  ( q  r )
 p  (q  r )  ( p  q )  ( p  r )
b) Distributive Laws (Dist.):
p  (q  r )  ( p  q )  ( p  r )

c) Transitive Law (Trans.): ( p  q)  (q  r )  p  r

Theorem 5. Let p, q, r, and s be any statements. Then

( p  q)  ( r  s)  [( p  r )  ( q  s)]
a) Constructive Dilemmas (C.D.):
( p  q)  ( r  s)  [( p  r )  ( q  s)]

( p  q)  ( r  s )  [(~ q ~ s)  (~ p  ~ r )]
b) Destructive Dilemmas (D.D.):
( p  q)  ( r  s )  [(~ q  ~ s)  (~ p  ~ r )]

Theorem 6. Let p, q and r be statements. Then

a) Modus Ponens (M.P.): ( p  q)  p  q

b) Modus Tollens (M.T.): ( p  q)  ~ q ~ p
c) Reduction Absurdum (R.A.): ( p  q)  ( p  ~ q )  (q  ~ q)
d) Material Implication (Imp.) p  q ~ p  q

p  q  [( p  q )  (q  p )]
e) Material Equivalence (Equiv.)
p  q  [( p  q )  (~ p  ~ q )]

f) Exportation (Exp.) ( p  q)  r  p  (q  r )

g) Absurdity (Abs.) [( p  q)  ( p ~ q)]  ~ p

~ f t ~t f p ~ p  t
h) Identities (Ident.) pt  t pt  p p ~ p  f
p f  p p f  f

Exercise: Prove Theorems 1 through 6.

Arguments

Definition 10: An Argument is a collection of propositions where it is claimed that one of the
propositions called the conclusion follows from the other propositions called the premises of the
argument.
Example:

1. It will rain only if there is moisture in the air. There will be moisture in the air only if the
wind blows in from the sea. The wind blows in from the sea only if the land is hotter
than the sea. So, if the land is not hotter than the sea it will not rain.
2. Whenever Ryan has been drinking he exaggerates, and he is exaggerating so he has been
drinking.
3. Since all the swans we have seen have been white, we claim that swans are white.
4. I believe that Ronald is the best prospect for the highest position in the company. He is
very intelligent and articulate. He is also well respected in the business community.

Two general types of arguments:

1. Deductive Argument – is one where the claim is the conclusion absolutely follows from
the premises. If the argument is proven to be valid through the use of logic, then we are
absolutely certain that the conclusion follows from the premises.

2. Inductive Argument – is one where the claim is that within a certain probability of error
the conclusion follows from the premises. (Mathematical Induction guarantees absolute
certainty in the conclusion that is derived from an Inductive argument).

Definition of a Valid Argument

An argument is said to be a valid argument if the conjunctions of the premises/hypotheses are

implies the conclusion, Thus p1 , p2 ,..., pn  q is valid iff p1  p2 ,...,  pn  q is a tautology.
Otherwise, the argument is invalid.

Proof of Invalidity of an Argument

The invalidity of an argument may be verified by showing that its propositional form is not a
tautology. Since the propositional form of an argument is an implication, then we should be able
to show an instance when the premise is true but the conclusion is false. We do not have to
construct the whole truth table for the propositional form to do this. All we have to do is
determine the combination of values that makes the propositional form of the argument false.
This simplified process of constructing a truth table is called the shortened truth table method of
showing the invalidity of an argument. One counter example which gives the truth values of the
propositions in the argument that make all the premises true and the conclusion false is enough to
disprove the validity of the argument.
Example:

1. Prove the invalidity of the following arguments:

ab e  ( f  g)
cd g  (h  i )
a) b)
bc ~h
ad ei

Exercise: Prove the invalidity of the following arguments:

m  (n  c)
a be
n  ( p  q)
cd
1. qr 2.
b  c ~ e
~ (r  p
ad
~m

Quantification Theory:

Definition: A general proposition is a simple proposition which attributes a certain property or

a relation to unspecified elements of a set.

Definition: An individual variable represents any arbitrary element of a certain collection of

terms. The collection of terms is the domain of the variable.

Definition: The universe of discourse or universe is the collection of all terms from which
values of individual variables may be drawn out.

Definition: A simple propositional function of n variables is defined to be an expression

consisting of an n-ary predicate symbol and n variables such that the expression becomes a
proposition when each of the variables is replaced by a constant belonging to its domain.

Definition of a valid, satisfiable, and unsatisfiable propositional function in the universe.

1. If the values of

Kurt Godel
born April 28, 1906, Brünn, Austria-Hungary
 
died Jan. 14, 1978, Princeton, N.J., U.S.

Gödel also spelled  Goedel   Austrian-born U.S. mathematician, logician, and author of Gödel's
proof, which states that within any rigidly logical mathematical system there are propositions (or
questions) that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system and
that, therefore, it is uncertain that the basic axioms of arithmetic will not give rise to
contradictions. This proof has become a hallmark of 20th-century mathematics, and its
repercussions continue to be felt and debated.

A member of the faculty of the University of Vienna from 1930, Gödel was also a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. (1933, 1935, 1938–52); he emigrated to the United
States in 1940 (naturalized 1948) and from 1953 served as a professor at the institute.

Gödel's proof first appeared in an article in the Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, vol. 38
(1931), on formally indeterminable propositions of the Principia Mathematica of Alfred North
Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. This article ended nearly a century of attempts to establish
axioms that would provide a rigorous basis for all mathematics, the most nearly (but, as Gödel
showed, by no means entirely) successful attempt having been the Principia Mathematica.
Another well-known work is Consistency of the Axiom of Choice and of the Generalized
Continuum-Hypothesis with the Axioms of Set Theory (1940; rev. ed., 1958), which has become a
classic of modern mathematics.

The first and second incompleteness theorem

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, from 1931, stands as a major turning point of 20th-century
logic. It states that no finitely axiomatizable theory sufficient to derive the Peano postulates is
both consistent and complete. (How Gödel proved this fascinating result is discussed more
extensively in the article mathematics, foundations of.) In other words, if we try to build a theory
sufficient for a foundation for mathematics, stating the axioms and rules of inference so that we
have stipulated precisely what is and what is not an axiom (as opposed to open-ended axiom
schemata), then the resulting theory will either (1) not be sufficient for mathematics (i.e., not
allow the derivation of the Peano postulates for number theory) or (2) not be complete (i.e., there
will be some valid proposition that is not derivable in the theory) or (3) be inconsistent. (Gödel
actually distinguished between consistency and a stronger feature, ω- [omega-] consistency.) A
corollary of this result is that, if a theory is finitely axiomatizable, consistent, and sufficient to
derive the Peano postulates, then that theory cannot be used as a metalanguage to show its own
consistency; that is, a finitely axiomatized set theory cannot be used to show the consistency of
finitely axiomatized set theory, if set theory is consistent. This is often called Gödel's second
incompleteness theorem.

Alan Turing
born June 23, 1912, London, England
 
died June 7, 1954, Wilmslow, Cheshire

in full  Alan Mathison Turing British mathematician and logician, who made major
contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and biology and to the new areas
later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.

Early life and career

The son of a British member of the Indian civil service, Turing entered King's College,
University of Cambridge, to study mathematics in 1931. After graduating in 1934, Turing was
elected to a fellowship at King's College in recognition of his research in probability theory. In
1936 Turing's seminal paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem] was recommended for publication by the American
mathematician-logician Alonzo Church, who had himself just published a paper that reached the
same conclusion as Turing's. Later that year, Turing moved to Princeton University to study for a
Ph.D. in mathematical logic under Church's direction (completed in 1938).

The Entscheidungsproblem seeks an effective method for deciding which mathematical

statements are provable within a given formal mathematical system and which are not. In 1936
Turing and Church independently showed that in general this problem has no solution, proving
that no consistent formal system of arithmetic is decidable. This result and others—notably the
mathematician-logician Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems—ended the dream of a system
that could banish ignorance from mathematics forever. (In fact, Turing and Church showed that
even some purely logical systems, considerably weaker than arithmetic, are undecidable.) An
important argument of Turing's and Church's was that the class of lambda-definable functions
(functions on the positive integers whose values can be calculated by a process of repeated
substitution) coincides with the class of all functions that are effectively calculable—or
computable. This claim is now known as Church's thesis—or as the Church-Turing thesis when
stated in the form that any effectively calculable function can be calculated by a universal Turing
machine, a type of abstract computer that Turing had introduced in the course of his proof.
(Turing showed in 1936 that the two formulations of the thesis are equivalent by proving that the
lambda-definable functions and the functions that can be calculated by a universal Turing
machine are identical.) In a review of Turing's work, Church acknowledged the superiority of
Turing's formulation of the thesis over his own, saying that the concept of computability by a
Turing machine “has the advantage of making the identification with effectiveness…evident
immediately.”

Code breaker
In the summer of 1938 Turing returned from the United States to his fellowship at King's
College. At the outbreak of hostilities with Germany in September 1939, he joined the wartime
headquarters of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.
The British government had just been given the details of efforts by the Poles, assisted by the
French, to break the Enigma code, used by the German military for their radio communications.
As early as 1932, a small team of Polish mathematician-cryptanalysts, led by Marian Rejewski,
had succeeded in reconstructing the internal wiring of the type of Enigma machine used by the
Germans, and by 1938 they had devised a code-breaking machine, code-named Bomba (the
Polish word for a type of ice cream). The Bomba depended for its success on German operating
procedures, and a change in procedures in May 1940 rendered the Bomba virtually useless.
During 1939 and the spring of 1940, Turing and others designed a radically different code-
breaking machine known as the Bombe. Turing's ingenious Bombes kept the Allies supplied
with intelligence for the remainder of the war. By early 1942 the Bletchley Park cryptanalysts
were decoding about 39,000 intercepted messages each month, which rose subsequently to more
than 84,000 per month. At the end of the war, Turing was made an officer of the Order of the
British Empire for his code-breaking work.

Computer designer
In 1945, the war being over, Turing was recruited to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in
London to design and develop an electronic computer. His design for the Automatic Computing
Engine (ACE) was the first relatively complete specification of an electronic stored-program
general-purpose digital computer. Had Turing's ACE been built as planned, it would have had
considerably more memory than any of the other early computers, as well as being faster.
However, his colleagues at NPL thought the engineering too difficult to attempt, and a much
simpler machine was built, the Pilot Model ACE.
In the end, NPL lost the race to build the world's first working electronic stored-program digital
computer—an honour that went to the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at the
University of Manchester in June 1948. Discouraged by the delays at NPL, Turing took up the
deputy directorship of the Computing Machine Laboratory in that year (there was no director).
His earlier theoretical concept of a universal Turing machine had been a fundamental influence
on the Manchester computer project from its inception. Turing's principal practical contribution
after his arrival at Manchester was to design the programming system of the Ferranti Mark I, the
world's first commercially available electronic digital computer.

Artificial intelligence pioneer

Turing was a founding father of modern cognitive science and a leading early exponent of the
hypothesis that the human brain is in large part a digital computing machine. He theorized that
the cortex at birth is an “unorganised machine” that through “training” becomes organized “into
a universal machine or something like it.” A pioneer of artificial intelligence, Turing proposed
(1950) what subsequently became known as the Turing test as a criterion for whether a machine
thinks.

Though he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in March 1951, Turing's life was about to
suffer a major reversal. In March 1952 he was prosecuted for homosexuality, then a crime in
Britain, and sentenced to 12 months of hormone “therapy”—a treatment that he seems to have
borne with amused fortitude. Judged a security risk by the British government, Turing lost his
security clearance and his access to ongoing government work with codes and computers. He
spent the rest of his short career at the University of Manchester, where he was appointed to a
specially created readership in the theory of computing in May 1953.

From 1951 Turing had been working on what is now known as artificial life. He wrote “The
Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” which described some of his research on the development of
pattern and form in living organisms, and he used the Ferranti Mark I computer to model
chemical mechanisms by which genes could control the development of anatomical structure in
plants and animals. In the midst of this groundbreaking work, Turing was discovered dead in his
bed, poisoned by cyanide. A homemade apparatus for silver-plating teaspoons, which included a
tank of cyanide, was found in the room next to his bedroom. The official verdict was suicide, but
no motive was ever discovered.