Relations: Concrete, Abstract, And Applied - An Introduction

Book excerpt: The book is intended as an invitation to the topic of relations on a rather general basis. It fills the gap between the basic knowledge offered in countless introductory papers and books (usually comprising orders and equivalences) and the highly specialized monographs on mainly relation algebras, many-valued (fuzzy) relations, or graphs. This is done not only by presenting theoretical results but also by giving hints to some of the many interesting application areas (also including their respective theoretical basics).This book is a new — and the first of its kind — compilation of known results on binary relations. It offers relational concepts in both reasonable depth and broadness, and also provides insight into the vast diversity of theoretical results as well as application possibilities beyond the commonly known examples.This book is unique by the spectrum of the topics it handles. As indicated in its title these are: