Combinatorics and ordered sets

For the mathematician interested in discrete mathematics, from the senior undergraduate to the professional level, this volume provides first-rate surveys of the important combinatorics themes in ordered sets. These expository lectures, given at a 1985 Joint Summer Research Conference, cover a wide range of topics, which include: the three-machine problem to illustrate the order-theoretic aspects of scheduling theory; the techniques used in settling the "e;matching conjecture"e;; the decomposition of ordered sets into few chains; the reorientation of graphs; the varied occurrences of the meet-distribution property; surveys techniques used in settling binary sorting problems; the formulation of a general viewpoint for retraction; the survey of cutsets; and the role played by subdiagrams in ordered sets.