ENGLISH

The joy of sets: Fundamentals of contemporary set theory

By Keith Devlin

Book information

Publisher
Springer
Year
1993
ISBN
9780387940946, 0387940944
LCC
QA248 .D38 1993
Open Library ID
OL1397210M
Language
english
Format
DJVU
Filesize
958 kB (981103 bytes)
Series
Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics
Edition
2nd
Pages
206\206
Topic
Mathematics Algebra
Library
Kolxo3
DPI
600
Orientation
yes
Scanned
yes
Time added
2009-07-20 03:45:11

Description

This book is intended to provide an account of those parts of contemporary set theory that are relevant to other areas of pure mathematics. Intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, the text is written in an easy-going style, with a minimum of formalism. The book begins with a review of "naive" set theory; it then develops the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of the theory, showing how they arise naturally from a rigorous answer to the question, "what is a set?" After discussing the ordinal and cardinal numbers, the book then delves into contemporary set theory, covering such topics as: the Borel hierarchy, stationary sets and regressive functions, and Lebesgue measure. Two chapters present an extension of the Zermelo-Fraenkel theory, discussing the axiom of constructibility and the question of provability in set theory. A final chapter presents an account of an alternative conception of set theory that has proved useful in computer science, the non-well-founded set theory of Peter Aczel. The author is a well-known mathematician and the editor of the "Computers in Mathematics" column in the AMS Notices and of FOCUS, the magazine published by the MAA.

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