ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Kuratowski closure axioms

Imagine you have a toy box with many toy cars but the box doesn't have a lid. Your mom tells you to put the lid on the box, so you start putting all the cars back into the box but some of them fall out. Your mom then takes the lid and puts it on the box to keep all the cars inside.

The Kuratowski closure axioms are kind of like putting a lid on a toy box. In math, we have things called sets, which are like boxes that hold different things. Sometimes we want to make sure that all the things that belong in a set are inside it and nothing is left outside.

The closure axioms help us to do this by providing rules that let us add things that are missing and keep out things that don't belong. There are two rules that help us put the "lid" on the set:

1. If we have two sets that belong to the big set we are trying to "lid" (for example, two toy cars in our case), then we can also include the set that contains those two sets inside the big set (for example, a container for two toy cars). This makes sure that all possible combinations of sets are included.

2. If we have a set that is already inside our big set (for example, a toy car already inside the toy box), then we can also include any set that belongs to that set inside the big set (for example, a little toy that came with the toy car). This makes sure that all the smaller parts of each set are included too.

So, by using these two rules we can put the "lid" on the set and make sure that everything is inside. Just like how your mom put a lid on your toy box to keep all the toy cars from falling out.