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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.
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.
A semiorder, defined from a utility function as above, is a partially ordered set with the following two properties: [3]. Whenever two disjoint pairs of elements are comparable, for instance as < and <, there must be an additional comparison among these elements, because () would imply < while () would imply <.
In order theory, a discipline within mathematics, a critical pair is a pair of elements in a partially ordered set that are incomparable but that could be made comparable without requiring any other changes to the partial order. Formally, let P = (S, ≤) be a partially ordered set.
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 given partially ordered set may have several different completions. For instance, one completion of any partially ordered set S is the set of its downwardly closed subsets ordered by inclusion. S is embedded in this (complete) lattice by mapping each element x to the lower set of elements that are less than or equal to x.