Non-well-founded set theories are variants of axiomatic set theory that allow sets to be elements of themselves and otherwise violate the rule of well-foundedness. In non-well-founded set theories, the foundation axiom of ZFC is replaced by axioms implying its negation. The study of non-well-founded sets was initiated by Dmitry Mirimanoff in a series of papers between 1917 and 1920, in which he formulated the distinction between well-founded and non-well-founded sets; he did not regard well-foundedness as an axiom. Although a number of axiomatic systems of non-well-founded sets were proposed afterwards, they did not find much in the way of applications until Peter Aczel’s hyperset theory in 1988. The theory of non-well-founded sets has been applied in the logical modelling of non-terminating computational processes in computer science (process algebra and final semantics), linguistics and natural language semantics (situation theory), philosophy (work on the Liar Paradox), and in a different setting, non-standard analysis. Details In 1917, Dmitry Mirimanoff introduced the concept of well-foundedness of a set: A set, x0, is well-founded if it has no infinite descending membership sequence In ZFC, there is no infinite descending ∈-sequence by the axiom of regularity. In fact, the axiom of regularity is often called the foundation axiom since it can be proved within ZFC− (that is, ZFC without the axiom of regularity) that well-foundedness implies regularity. In variants of ZFC without the axiom of regularity, the possibility of non-well-founded sets with set-like ∈-chains arises. For example, a set A such that A ∈ A is non-well-founded. Although Mirimanoff also introduced a notion of isomorphism between possibly non-well-founded sets, he considered neither an axiom of foundation nor of anti-foundation. In 1926, Paul Finsler introduced the first axiom that allowed non-well-founded sets. After Zermelo adopted Foundation into his own system in 1930 (from previous work of von Neumann 1925–1929) interest in non-well-founded sets waned for decades. An early non-well-founded set theory was Willard Van Orman Quine’s New Foundations, although it is not merely ZF with a replacement for Foundation. Several proofs of the independence of Foundation from the rest of ZF were published in 1950s particularly by Paul Bernays (1954), following an announcement of the result in an earlier paper of his from 1941, and by Ernst Specker who gave a different proof in his Habilitationsschrift of 1951, proof which was published in 1957. Then in 1957 Rieger's theorem was published, which gave a general method for