Non‐well‐founded extensions of \documentclass{article}\usepackage{amssymb}\begin{document}\pagestyle{empty}$\mathbf {V}$\end{document}

This paper describes a new and user‐friendly method for constructing models of non‐well‐founded set theory. Given a sufficiently well‐behaved system θ of non‐well‐founded set‐theoretic equations, we describe how to construct a model M_θ for $\mathsf {ZFC}^-$ in which θ has a non‐degenerate solution. We shall prove that this M_θ is the smallest model for $\mathsf {ZFC}^-$ which contains $\mathbf {V}$ and has a non‐degenerate solution of θ.