More lattice stuff

February 18th, 2005 ~ Posted in: Mathematics

I’ve continued reading about lattice theory. It’s exactly what I need to stimulate an interest in my algebra class.

One interesting fact I came across was that a lattice is distributive iff it doesn’t contain a diamond or pentagon as a sublattice. That’s interesting not only because it is a totally unexpected condition for sufficiency, but also in graph theory, there’s a similar condition on the planarity of graphs. I wonder if there’s any significant connection between lattices and graph theory, via directed graphs maybe?

Another interesting fact: \lcm( a, \gcd(b, c)) = \gcd(\lcm(a, b),\lcm(a,c)) since (\N, \gcd, \lcm) is a distributive lattice (unfortunately, this equality has to be proven to show that it is in fact a distributive lattice), and since this is true, so is the formula \gcd( a, \lcm(b, c)) = \lcm(\gcd(a, b),\gcd(a,c)) (this one is automatic, since the first one shows that it is a distributive lattice).

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