Good Math

Don’t Keep It Simple, Stupid

There’s an old mantra among engineers called the KISS principle. KISS stands for “Keep it simple, stupid!” The idea is that when you’re building something useful, you should make it as simple as possible. The more moving parts something has, the more complicated corners it has, the more likely it is that an error will slip by.

Looked at from that perspective, naive set theory looks great. It’s so beautifully simple. What I wrote in the last section was the entire basis of naive set theory. It looks like you don’t need any more than that!

Unfortunately, set theory in practice needs to be a lot more complicated. In the next section, we’ll look at an axiomatization of set theory, and yeah, it’s going be a whole ...