Basic Posets

An introduction to the theory of partially-ordered sets, or "posets". The text is presented in rather an informal manner, with examples and computations, which rely on the Hasse diagram to build graphical intuition for the structure of infinite posets.

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This book introduces the reader to the general theory of partially ordered sets, i.e., posets. The text is presented in a rather informal manner, with interesting examples and computations, which rely on the Hasse diagram to build graphical intuition for the structure of finite posets. The proofs of a small number of theorems is included in the appendix. Important examples especially the Letter N poset, which plays a role akin to that of the Petersen graph in providing a candidate counterexample to many propositions, are used repeatedly throughout the text.