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Another difficulty with the idea of a universal set concerns the power set of the set of all sets. Because this power set is a set of sets, it would necessarily be a subset of the set of all sets, provided that both exist. However, this conflicts with Cantor's theorem that the power set of any set (whether infinite or not) always has strictly ...
In mathematics, the power set (or powerset) of a set S is the set of all subsets of S, including the empty set and S itself. [1] In axiomatic set theory (as developed, for example, in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set . [ 2 ]
For instance, when investigating properties of the real numbers R (and subsets of R), R may be taken as the universal set. A true universal set is not included in standard set theory (see Paradoxes below), but is included in some non-standard set theories. Given a universal set U and a subset A of U, the complement of A (in U) is defined as
In mathematical set theory, Cantor's theorem is a fundamental result which states that, for any set, the set of all subsets of , known as the power set of , has a strictly greater cardinality than itself.
The set of subsets of a given set (its power set) ordered by inclusion (see Fig. 1). Similarly, the set of sequences ordered by subsequence, and the set of strings ordered by substring. The set of natural numbers equipped with the relation of divisibility. (see Fig. 3 and Fig. 6) The vertex set of a directed acyclic graph ordered by reachability.
In the simplest version of the powerset construction, the set of all states of the DFA is the powerset of Q, the set of all possible subsets of Q. However, many states of the resulting DFA may be useless as they may be unreachable from the initial state. An alternative version of the construction creates only the states that are actually reachable.
The power set axiom does not specify what subsets of a set exist, only that there is a set containing all those that do. [2] Not all conceivable subsets are guaranteed to exist. In particular, the power set of an infinite set would contain only "constructible sets" if the universe is the constructible universe but in other models of ZF set ...
Now consider two subsets of S and set their distance apart as the size of their symmetric difference. This distance is in fact a metric, which makes the power set on S a metric space. If S has n elements, then the distance from the empty set to S is n, and this is the maximum distance for any pair of subsets. [6]