Set Operations Discussion

(The following is/are the initial prompt(s) for an online discussion; students may have posted responses, and prompts for further discussion may have been added, but these things are not shown.)

This exercise helps you become familiar with the basic operations of intersection, union, difference, and complement on sets, as well as related notions such as cardinality and power set.

Give a few examples of everyday things that can be thought of as sets. No one person has to give many examples, it would be nice if several people each contributed an example or two.

Once some examples have been offered, see if you can work out intersections, unions, differences, and complements of some. For complements, what universal set(s) did you assume? Also see if you can work out the power set of one or more examples.

Also, see if you can figure out what the cardinalities of some of the example sets are. Similarly, what are the cardinalities of the intersections, unions, power sets, etc. that have been suggested?