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An antichain in a partially ordered set is a set of elements no two of which are comparable to each other, and a chain is a set of elements every two of which are comparable. A chain decomposition is a partition of the elements of the order into disjoint chains. Dilworth's theorem states that, in any finite partially ordered set, the largest ...
A totally ordered set is a partially ordered set in which any two elements are comparable. The Szpilrajn extension theorem states that every partial order is contained in a total order. Intuitively, the theorem says that any method of comparing elements that leaves some pairs incomparable can be extended in such a way that every pair becomes ...
A partially ordered set (poset for short) is an ordered pair = (,) consisting of a set (called the ground set of ) and a partial order on . When the meaning is clear from context and there is no ambiguity about the partial order, the set X {\displaystyle X} itself is sometimes called a poset.
An antichain in is a subset of in which each pair of different elements is incomparable; that is, there is no order relation between any two different elements in . (However, some authors use the term "antichain" to mean strong antichain , a subset such that there is no element of the poset smaller than two distinct elements of the antichain.)
In a partially ordered set there may be some elements that play a special role. The most basic example is given by the least element of a poset. For example, 1 is the least element of the positive integers and the empty set is the least set under the subset order. Formally, an element m is a least element if: m ≤ a, for all elements a of the ...
A nontrivial poset satisfying the descending chain condition is said to have deviation 0. Then, inductively, a poset is said to have deviation at most α (for an ordinal α) if for every descending chain of elements a 0 > a 1 >... all but a finite number of the posets of elements between a n and a n+1 have deviation less than α. The deviation ...
The identity function on any partially ordered set is always an order automorphism. Negation is an order isomorphism from ( R , ≤ ) {\displaystyle (\mathbb {R} ,\leq )} to ( R , ≥ ) {\displaystyle (\mathbb {R} ,\geq )} (where R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } is the set of real numbers and ≤ {\displaystyle \leq } denotes the usual numerical ...
The first diagram makes clear that the power set is a graded poset.The second diagram has the same graded structure, but by making some edges longer than others, it emphasizes that the 4-dimensional cube is a combinatorial union of two 3-dimensional cubes, and that a tetrahedron (abstract 3-polytope) likewise merges two triangles (abstract 2-polytopes).