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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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Base.See continuous poset.; Binary relation.A binary relation over two sets is a subset of their Cartesian product.; Boolean algebra.A Boolean algebra is a distributive lattice with least element 0 and greatest element 1, in which every element x has a complement ¬x, such that x ∧ ¬x = 0 and x ∨ ¬x = 1.
This is a graph with a vertex for each element of the order and an edge for each pair of incomparable elements. Using this coloring interpretation, together with a separate proof of Dilworth's theorem for finite partially ordered sets, it is possible to prove that an infinite partially ordered set has finite width w {\displaystyle w} if and ...
Every cofinal subset of a partially ordered set with maximal elements must contain all maximal elements. A subset L {\displaystyle L} of a partially ordered set P {\displaystyle P} is said to be a lower set of P {\displaystyle P} if it is downward closed: if y ∈ L {\displaystyle y\in L} and x ≤ y {\displaystyle x\leq y} then x ∈ L ...