Disjoint sets are collections of distinct elements that do not share any common members. Each set in a disjoint set system is separate from the others, meaning that if you take any two sets from the collection, their intersection is empty. This property makes disjoint sets useful in various applications, such as in computer science for managing groups of items or in mathematics for organizing data. In computer science, disjoint sets are often implemented using a data structure called a union-find or disjoint-set data structure. This structure allows for efficient operations to unite two sets and to find which set a particular element belongs to. These operations are crucial in algorithms for tasks like network connectivity and Kruskal's algorithm for finding minimum spanning trees.