In mathematical logic and computer science, the Kleene star (or Kleene operator or Kleene closure) is a unary operation, either on sets of strings or on sets of symbols or characters. In mathematics it is more commonly known as the free monoid construction. The application of the Kleene star to a set V is written as V^*. It is widely used for regular expressions, which is the context in which it was introduced by Stephen Kleene to characterise certain automata, where it means "zero or more".