This outstanding text is written in clear language and enhanced with many exercises, diagrams, and proofs. It discusses historical developments and future directions and provides an extensive bibliography and references. 1971 edition.

This book started with Lattice Theory, First Concepts, in 1971. Then came General Lattice Theory, First Edition, in 1978, and the Second Edition twenty years later. Since the publication of the first edition in 1978, General Lattice Theory has become the authoritative introduction to lattice theory for graduate students and the standard reference for researchers. The First Edition set out to introduce and survey lattice theory. Some 12,000 papers have been published in the field since then; so Lattice Theory: Foundation focuses on introducing the field, laying the foundation for special topics and applications. Lattice Theory: Foundation, based on the previous three books, covers the fundamental concepts and results. The main topics are distributivity, congruences, constructions, modularity and semimodularity, varieties, and free products. The chapter on constructions is new, all the other chapters are revised and expanded versions from the earlier volumes. Almost 40 “diamond sections’’, many written by leading specialists in these fields, provide a brief glimpse into special topics beyond the basics. “Lattice theory has come a long way... For those who appreciate lattice theory, or who are curious about its techniques and intriguing internal problems, Professor Grätzer's lucid new book provides a most valuable guide to many recent developments. Even a cursory reading should provide those few who may still believe that lattice theory is superficial or naive, with convincing evidence of its technical depth and sophistication.” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society “Grätzer’s book General Lattice Theory has become the lattice theorist’s bible.” Mathematical Reviews

In the first half of the nineteenth century, George Boole's attempt to formalize propositional logic led to the concept of Boolean algebras. While investigating the axiomatics of Boolean algebras at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles S. Peirce and Ernst Schröder found it useful to introduce the lattice concept. Independently, Richard Dedekind's research on ideals of algebraic numbers led to the same discov ery. In fact, Dedekind also introduced modularity, a weakened form of distri butivity. Although some of the early results of these mathematicians and of Edward V. Huntington are very elegant and far from trivial, they did not attract the attention of the mathematical community. It was Garrett Birkhoff's work in the mid-thirties that started the general develop ment of lattice theory. In a brilliant series of papers he demonstrated the importance of lattice theory and showed that it provides a unifying framework for hitherto unrelated developments in many mathematical disciplines. Birkhoff himself, Valere Glivenko, Karl Menger, John von Neumann, Oystein Ore, and others had developed enough of this new field for Birkhoff to attempt to "seIl" it to the general mathematical community, which he did with astonishing success in the first edition of his Lattice Theory. The further development of the subject matter can best be followed by com paring the first, second, and third editions of his book (G. Birkhoff [1940], [1948], and [1967]).

A computational perspective on partial order and lattice theory, focusing on algorithms and their applications This book provides a uniform treatment of the theory and applications of lattice theory. The applications covered include tracking dependency in distributed systems, combinatorics, detecting global predicates in distributed systems, set families, and integer partitions. The book presents algorithmic proofs of theorems whenever possible. These proofs are written in the calculational style advocated by Dijkstra, with arguments explicitly spelled out step by step. The author’s intent is for readers to learn not only the proofs, but the heuristics that guide said proofs. Introduction to Lattice Theory with Computer Science Applications: Examines; posets, Dilworth’s theorem, merging algorithms, lattices, lattice completion, morphisms, modular and distributive lattices, slicing, interval orders, tractable posets, lattice enumeration algorithms, and dimension theory Provides end of chapter exercises to help readers retain newfound knowledge on each subject Includes supplementary material at www.ece.utexas.edu/~garg Introduction to Lattice Theory with Computer Science Applications is written for students of computer science, as well as practicing mathematicians.

This new edition of Introduction to Lattices and Order presents a radical reorganization and updating, though its primary aim is unchanged. The explosive development of theoretical computer science in recent years has, in particular, influenced the book's evolution: a fresh treatment of fixpoints testifies to this and Galois connections now feature prominently. An early presentation of concept analysis gives both a concrete foundation for the subsequent theory of complete lattices and a glimpse of a methodology for data analysis that is of commercial value in social science. Classroom experience has led to numerous pedagogical improvements and many new exercises have been added. As before, exposure to elementary abstract algebra and the notation of set theory are the only prerequisites, making the book suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. It will also be a valuable resource for anyone who meets ordered structures.

This book is intended to be a thorough introduction to the subject of order and lattices, with an emphasis on the latter. It can be used for a course at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level or for independent study. Prerequisites are kept to a minimum, but an introductory course in abstract algebra is highly recommended, since many of the examples are drawn from this area. This is a book on pure mathematics: I do not discuss the applications of lattice theory to physics, computer science or other disciplines. Lattice theory began in the early 1890s, when Richard Dedekind wanted to know the answer to the following question: Given three subgroups EF , and G of an abelian group K, what is the largest number of distinct subgroups that can be formed using these subgroups and the operations of intersection and sum (join), as in E?FßÐE?FÑ?GßE?ÐF?GÑ and so on? In lattice-theoretic terms, this is the number of elements in the relatively free modular lattice on three generators. Dedekind [15] answered this question (the answer is #)) and wrote two papers on the subject of lattice theory, but then the subject lay relatively dormant until Garrett Birkhoff, Oystein Ore and others picked it up in the 1930s. Since then, many noted mathematicians have contributed to the subject, including Garrett Birkhoff, Richard Dedekind, Israel Gelfand, George Grätzer, Aleksandr Kurosh, Anatoly Malcev, Oystein Ore, Gian-Carlo Rota, Alfred Tarski and Johnny von Neumann.