BASIC POSETS

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.