A mathematics book with six authors is perhaps a rare enough occurrence to make a reader ask how such a collaboration came about. We begin, therefore, with a few words on how we were brought to the subject over a ten-year period, during part of which time we did not all know each other. We do not intend to write here the history of continuous lattices but rather to explain our own personal involvement. History in a more proper sense is provided by the bibliography and the notes following the sections of the book, as well as by many remarks in the text. A coherent discussion of the content and motivation of the whole study is reserved for the introduction. In October of 1969 Dana Scott was lead by problems of semantics for computer languages to consider more closely partially ordered structures of function spaces. The idea of using partial orderings to correspond to spaces of partially defined functions and functionals had appeared several times earlier in recursive function theory; however, there had not been very sustained interest in structures of continuous functionals. These were the ones Scott saw that he needed. His first insight was to see that - in more modern terminology - the category of algebraic lattices and the (so-called) Scott-continuous functions is cartesian closed.

Table of contents

This book contains articles on the notion of a continuous lattice, which has its roots in Dana Scott's work on a mathematical theory of computation, presented at a conference on categorical and topological aspects of continuous lattices held in 1982.

Introducing Stone–Priestley duality theory and its applications to logic and theoretical computer science, this book equips graduate students and researchers with the theoretical background necessary for reading and understanding current research in the area. After giving a thorough introduction to the algebraic, topological, logical, and categorical aspects of the theory, the book covers two advanced applications in computer science, namely in domain theory and automata theory. These topics are at the forefront of active research seeking to unify semantic methods with more algorithmic topics in finite model theory. Frequent exercises punctuate the text, with hints and references provided.

This volume contains all twenty-three of the principal survey papers presented at the Symposium on Ordered Sets held at Banff, Canada from August 28 to September 12, 1981. The Symposium was supported by grants from the NATO Advanced Study Institute programme, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Mathematical Society Summer Research Institute programme, and the University of Calgary. tve are very grateful to these Organizations for their considerable interest and support. Over forty years ago on April 15, 1938 the first Symposium on Lattice Theory was held in Charlottesville, U.S.A. in conjunction with a meeting of the American Mathematical Society. The principal addresses on that occasion were Lattices and their applications by G. Birkhoff, On the application of structure theory to groups by O. Ore, and The representation of Boolean algebras by M. H. Stone. The texts of these addresses and three others by R. Baer, H. M. MacNeille, and K. Menger appear in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 44, 1938. In those days the theory of ordered sets, and especially lattice theory was described as a "vigorous and promising younger brother of group theory." Some early workers hoped that lattice theoretic methods would lead to solutions of important problems in group theory.

This volume is the proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Language Semantics held at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 8-10, 1987. The 1st Workshop was at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas in April, 1985 (see LNCS 239), and the 2nd Workshop with a limited number of participants was at Kansas State in April, 1986. It was the intention of the organizers that the 3rd Workshop survey as many areas of the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Language Semantics as reasonably possible. The Workshop attracted 49 submitted papers, from which 28 papers were chosen for presentation. The papers ranged in subject from category theory and Lambda-calculus to the structure theory of domains and power domains, to implementation issues surrounding semantics.