Invited Speaker: Brian A. Davey

In the late 1980s, when the first edition of Introduction to Lattices and Order was in gestation, the authors (the speaker and his colleague Hilary Priestley of Oxford University) made a decision that was considered by some of their colleagues to be rather radical. As a closing chapter, they included an introduction to the basics of Formal Concept Analysis, a topic, if not in its infancy, then in its early adolescence. This decision has been more than vindicated over the years.

Based on their experience of teaching lattice theory to undergraduates between 1990 and 2000, the authors decided to reorder the chapters of the text and to present them in the order that they taught them. So we find in the second edition of Introduction to Lattices and Order, published in 2002, that Formal Concept Analysis has been promoted from Chapter 11 to Chapter 3. In this talk I will give a gentle introduction to Formal Concept Analysis intended for the uninitiated and will show how it both reinforces and leads naturally to other important topics within lattice theory.