Hereditarily finite sets are sets which are finite, whose members are finite, the members of whose members are finite, and so on. In ZF there are but countably many such sets; they constitute Vω. Were ZF to lose its axiom of regularity, however, one could not guarantee that the number of hereditarily finite sets would remain countable.

In Mostowski set theory, in which atomic sets are permissible, each atom, in isolation, would form a hereditarily finite collection. The number of hereditarily finite sets could be anything one should choose.

Even in a world that did not permit the free adjunction of arbitrary, meaningless atoms, the number of hereditarily finite sets could remain large. In Finsler set theory, it is shown as Theorem 22, below, that there are uncountably many hereditarily finite sets.

The reader who is interested in this paradoxical sounding fact can turn directly to §4 after grasping these introductory concepts. §3 is an exhaustive list of the smallest Finsler sets; it is hoped that this list will prove useful in checking future attempts to classify the finite Finsler sets.

Finsler set theory is not a firmly axiomatized theory. It is, at its present stage, a family of theories undergoing evolution. It permits the usual mathematical operations with sets. One can employ ordinal numbers, cardinal numbers, and the usual methods of Cantorian set theory freely. But there is a somewhat different interpretation attached to the concept “set” than one is used to in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, ZF.