Graphs and Order

Book excerpt: This volume contains the accounts of the principal survey papers presented at GRAPHS and ORDER, held at Banff, Canada from May 18 to May 31, 1984. This conference was supported by grants from the N.A.T.O. Advanced Study Institute programme, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the University of Calgary. We are grateful for all of this considerable support. Almost fifty years ago the first Symposium on Lattice Theory was held in Charlottesville, U.S.A. On that occasion the principal lectures were delivered by G. Birkhoff, O. Ore and M.H. Stone. In those days the theory of ordered sets was thought to be a vigorous relative of group theory. Some twenty-five years ago the Symposium on Partially Ordered Sets and Lattice Theory was held in Monterey, U.S.A. Among the principal speakers at that meeting were R.P. Dilworth, B. Jonsson, A. Tarski and G. Birkhoff. Lattice theory had turned inward: it was concerned primarily with problems about lattices themselves. As a matter of fact the problems that were then posed have, by now, in many instances, been completely solved.