This text was born out of an advanced mathematical economics seminar at Caltech in 1989-90. We realized that the typical graduate student in mathematical economics has to be familiar with a vast amount of material that spans several traditional fields in mathematics. Much of the mate rial appears only in esoteric research monographs that are designed for specialists, not for the sort of generalist that our students need be. We hope that in a small way this text will make the material here accessible to a much broader audience. While our motivation is to present and orga nize the analytical foundations underlying modern economics and finance, this is a book of mathematics, not of economics. We mention applications to economics but present very few of them. They are there to convince economists that the material has so me relevance and to let mathematicians know that there are areas of application for these results. We feel that this text could be used for a course in analysis that would benefit math ematicians, engineers, and scientists. Most of the material we present is available elsewhere, but is scattered throughout a variety of sources and occasionally buried in obscurity. Some of our results are original (or more likely, independent rediscoveries). We have included some material that we cannot honestly say is neces sary to understand modern economic theory, but may yet prove useful in future research.

During the last twenty-five years, the development of the theory of Banach lattices has stimulated new directions of research in the theory of positive operators and the theory of semigroups of positive operators. In particular, the recent investigations in the structure of the lattice ordered (Banach) algebra of the order bounded operators of a Banach lattice have led to many important results in the spectral theory of positive operators. The contributions contained in this volume were presented as lectures at a conference organized by the Caribbean Mathematics Foundation, and provide an overview of the present state of development of various areas of the theory of positive operators and their spectral properties. This book will be of interest to analysts whose work involves positive matrices and positive operators.

The book is the first systematical treatment of the theory of finite elements in Archimedean vector lattices and contains the results known on this topic up to the year 2013. It joins all important contributions achieved by a series of mathematicians that can only be found in scattered in literature.