The notion of right-ordered groups is fundamental in theories of I-groups, ordered groups, torsion-free groups, and the theory of zero-divisors free rings, as well as in theoretical physics. Right-Ordered Groups is the first book to provide a systematic presentation of right-ordered group theory, describing all known and new results in the field. The volume addresses topics such as right-ordered groups and order permutation groups, the system of convex subgroups of a right-ordered group, and free products of right-ordered groups.

Recently the theory of partially ordered groups has been used by analysts, algebraists, topologists and model theorists. This book presents the most important results and topics in the theory with proofs that rely on (and interplay with) other areas of mathematics. It concludes with a list of some unsolved problems for the reader to tackle. In stressing both the special techniques of the discipline and the overlap with other areas of pure mathematics, the book should be of interest to a wide audience in diverse areas of mathematics.

This book deals with the connections between topology and ordered groups. It begins with a self-contained introduction to orderable groups and from there explores the interactions between orderability and objects in low-dimensional topology, such as knot theory, braid groups, and 3-manifolds, as well as groups of homeomorphisms and other topological structures. The book also addresses recent applications of orderability in the studies of codimension-one foliations and Heegaard-Floer homology. The use of topological methods in proving algebraic results is another feature of the book. The book was written to serve both as a textbook for graduate students, containing many exercises, and as a reference for researchers in topology, algebra, and dynamical systems. A basic background in group theory and topology is the only prerequisite for the reader.

The study of groups equipped with a compatible lattice order ("lattice-ordered groups" or "I!-groups") has arisen in a number of different contexts. Examples of this include the study of ideals and divisibility, dating back to the work of Dedekind and continued by Krull; the pioneering work of Hahn on totally ordered abelian groups; and the work of Kantorovich and other analysts on partially ordered function spaces. After the Second World War, the theory of lattice-ordered groups became a subject of study in its own right, following the publication of fundamental papers by Birkhoff, Nakano and Lorenzen. The theory blossomed under the leadership of Paul Conrad, whose important papers in the 1960s provided the tools for describing the structure for many classes of I!-groups in terms of their convex I!-subgroups. A particularly significant success of this approach was the generalization of Hahn's embedding theorem to the case of abelian lattice-ordered groups, work done with his students John Harvey and Charles Holland. The results of this period are summarized in Conrad's "blue notes" [C].