Chapter 4: Sets

Sets and Venn diagrams

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A wooden spoon, a wooden fork, and a wooden knife on a plate. — **Figure 4.1** A spoon, fork, and knife are elements of the set of flatware.A spoon, fork, and knife are elements of the set of flatware. (credit: modification of work “Cupofjoy” Wikimedia CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication)

Think back to your kitchen organization. If the drawer is the set, then the forks and knives are elements in the set. Sets can be described in a number of different ways: by roster, by set-builder notation, by interval notation, by graphing on a number line, and by Venn diagrams. Sets are typically designated with capital letters. The simplest way to represent a set with only a few members is the roster (or listing) method, in which the elements in a set are listed, enclosed by curly braces and separated by commas. For example, if $F$ represents the set of utensils in our kitchen drawer, we can represent $F$ by using the following set notation with the roster method:

$F = {fork, spoon, knife, meat thermometer, can opener}$

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