Sets: An Introduction

This book provides a first course in set theory suitable for final year undergraduates in mathematics. The book develops the subject from first principles and presupposes little more than an elementary grounding in logic. Throughout much attention is paid to the subject's historical and philosophical development. The book differs from most books on set theory in that it aims in its approach to introduce the axioms of set theory in a natural way and to show how they come to take the form they do. The text covers all the basic tools of set theory - the natural numbers, cardinals, ordinals, and the axiom of choice - in some detail. It also provides an account of the representation theory of lattices and how this is closely connected with various forms of the axiom of choice.