Set Theory: An Open Introduction

Book Cover

Set Theory: An Open Introduction is a brief introduction to the philosophy of set theory. It is written for students with a little background in logic, and some high school mathematics. By the end of this book, students reading it might have a sense of:

  • why set theory came about;
  • how to reduce large swathes of mathematics to set theory + arithmetic;
  • how to embed arithmetic in set theory;
  • what the cumulative iterative conception of set amounts to;
  • how one might try to justify the axioms of ZFC.

This repository/directory only contains the LaTeX files and illustrations needed to typeset the textbook Set Theory, which in turn requires the Open Logic Text. Most of the material making up the text comes from Tim Button’s Open Set Theory.

You can download the PDF from the Open Logic builds site.

You can order a hardcopy of the Fall 2021 edition from Amazon [US|CA|UK|DE|AU].

To install and compile:

  • Download/install the Open Logic Text from GitHub, including photos if you want those.
  • Navigate to the subdirectory courses/
  • Put the content of this repository into a subdirectory of it, say courses/set-theory.

If you use git, this should do it:

# git clone https://github.com/OpenLogicProject/OpenLogic.git
# cd OpenLogic/courses
# git clone https://github.com/OpenLogicProject/set-theory.git
# cd ../assets
# git clone https://github.com/OpenLogicProject/photos.git

Inside courses/set-theory, you can now compile:

# pdflatex settheory-screen

or just # make if you have latexmk installed. (You’ll also have to do bibtex settheory-screen for the bibliography.)

The file settheory-screen.tex produces a color version of the text with smaller margins for screen reading.

The file loads settheory.tex, which contains the actual material. It in turn includes other files, most of them from the OpenLogic repository. So you won’t get a complete book unless you download into the right subdirectory of and compile from there.

Creative Commons License

Set Theory by Tim Button is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.