POSETS : a Mathematica Package PART 1: Basic Commands and Families of Posets
POSETS : A Mathematica Package PART 1: Basic Commands and Families of Posets Curtis Greene, Eugenie Hunsicker, Department of Mathematics, Haverford College 19041, July 1990 Updates 1992-94: John Dollhopf, Sam Hsiao, Curtis Greene Updates 2008: Erica Greene, Curtis Greene Updates 2010-12: Ian Burnette, Curtis Greene 1. Introduction This document illustrates a Mathematica package designed to generate, display, and explore finite partially ordered sets ("posets"), emphasizing properties of use in combinatorics. The package has two distinctive features: (1) a large repertoire of built-in examples (Boolean lattices, subword posets, lattices of partitions, distributive lattices, Young's lattice, Bruhat orders, etc.), and (2) the ability to generate a poset directly from its formal definition, i.e., from a Mathematica program defining its "covering function". A poset may also be defined by listing its covering pairs, or by giving any generating set of ordered pairs, or the incidence matrix corresponding to such a relation. In addition, there are tools for constructing new posets from old: product and sum, subposet, distributive lattice of order ideals, etc. Once a poset has been generated (“built”), a large number of additional tools are available for studying its combina- torial structure. These existing tools reflect the authors' combinatorial interests: enumerative invariants, chains, multichains, antichains, rank generating functions, Mobius functions, linear extensions, and related topics. A good reference for these topics is Richard Stanley's book, Enumerative Combinatorics V1 (Wadsworth, 1986). About this documentation: our intention has not been to write a "users manual", but rather to give an informal demonstration of principal features. The documentation consists of two segments: Part 1 (this notebook) illustrates the basic commands by applying them to some well-known combinatorial families of posets.
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