This brief article is intended to introduce the reader to the field of algebraic set theory, in which models of set theory of a new and fascinating kind are determined algebraically. The method is quite robust, applying to various classical, intuitionistic, and constructive set theories. Under this scheme some familiar set theoretic properties are related to algebraic ones, while others result from logical constraints. Conventional elementary set theories are complete with respect to algebraic models, which arise in a variety of ways, such as topologically, type-theoretically, and through variation. Many previous results from topos theory involving realizability, permutation, and sheaf models of set theory are subsumed, and the prospects for further such unification seem bright.

Church's Thesis asserts that the only numeric functions that can be calculated by effective means are the recursive ones, which are the same, extensionally, as the Turing-computable numeric functions. The Abstract State Machine Theorem states that every classical algorithm is behaviorally equivalent to an abstract state machine. This theorem presupposes three natural postulates about algorithmic computation. Here, we show that augmenting those postulates with an additional requirement regarding basic operations gives a natural axiomatization of computability and a proof of Church's Thesis, as Gödel and others suggested may be possible. In a similar way, but with a different set of basic operations, one can prove Turing's Thesis, characterizing the effective string functions, and—in particular—the effectively-computable functions on string representations of numbers.

We discuss the work of Paul Cohen in set theory and its influence, especially the background, discovery, development of forcing.

The well known Wiener-Kuratowski explicit definition of the ordered pair, which sets (x,y) = {{x}, {x,y}}, works well in many set theories but fails for those with classes which cannot be members of singletons. With the aid of the Axiom of Foundation, we propose a recursive definition of ordered pair which addresses this shortcoming and also naturally generalizes to ordered tuples of greater length. There are many advantages to the new definition, for it allows for uniform definitions working equally well in a wide range of models for set theories. In ZFC and closely related theories, the rank of an ordered pair of two infinite sets under the new definition turns out to be equal to the maximum of the ranks of the sets.