Subsets and subspaces (Q963930)

The literature devoted to set theory provides a rich collection of rules concerning a pair of sets. These relationships involve such notions and operations as subsets, unions, intersections, set difference and complement. In this paper, these relationships are revisited and considered from the point of view of the question whether they remain valid when the pair of sets is replaced with the pair of subspaces from \(\mathbb{C}_{n,1}\). The authors show that some of the set relationships hold true upon such a replacement, however, there is also an extensive class of relationships whose satisfaction is no longer guaranteed; in this class the commutativity of the orthogonal projectors onto the involved subspaces proves to play an important role. These considerations are supplemented with some related results inspired by probability theory. The characterizations of subspaces established in the paper are of interest not only because they originate from the set calculus or probability theory, but also as independent results of geometrical nature.