BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

SET 2)

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A collection or class of perfectly differenciable elements, which is considered as a whole.

Sets are usually represented by letters, while their relations are represented by connecting symbols.

A set can be:

- finite, if it contains a finite number of elements;

- infinite, if it contains an infinite number of elements;

- ordered, if each element occupies a well defined place:

- null, if it does not contain any element The set of all elements taken in account is the universal set, or universe.

Any set has a complement, i.e. the set which contains all the elements not belonging to the former one.

A subset is a set included within another one.

Sets may overlap, i.e. have at least one common element. On the contrary, sets without any common elements are disjoint sets.

Operations on sets are described by G. BOOLE's binary algebra. The well known VENN diagrams are geometric representations of sets. These representations have been recently generalized by A. EDWARDS (1989).

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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