2.0: Introduction

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The place from which we’ll start our walk is a body of mathematics called “set theory." Set theory has an amazing property: it’s so simple and applicable that almost all the rest of mathematics can be based on it! This is all the more remarkable because set theory itself came along pretty late in the game (as things go) — it was singlehandedly invented by one brilliant man, Georg Cantor, in the 1870’s. That may seem like a long time ago, but consider that by the time Cantor was born, mankind had already accumulated an immense wealth of mathematical knowledge: everything from geometry to algebra to calculus to prime numbers. Set theory was so elegant and universal, though, that after it was invented, nearly everything in math was redefined from the ground up to be couched in the language of sets. It turns out that this simple tool is an amazingly powerful way to reason about mathematical concepts of all flavors. Thus everything else in this book stands on set theory as a foundation.

Cantor, by the way, went insane as he tried to extend set theory to fully encompass the concept of infinity. Don’t let that happen to you.