The Principle of Inclusion/Exclusion (PIE) gives a method for finding the cardinality of the union of not necessarily disjoint sets. We saw in Section 1.1 how this works with three sets. To find how many things are in one or more of the sets \(A\text{,}\) \(B\text{,}\) and \(C\text{,}\) we should just add up the number of things in each of these sets. However, if there is any overlap among the sets, those elements are counted multiple times. So we subtract the things in each intersection of a pair of sets. But doing this removes elements which are in all three sets once too often, so we need to add it back in. In terms of cardinality of sets, we have