Two early lattice theory papers


The early history of lattice theory is studied in Herbert Mehrtens, Die Entstehung der Verbandstheorie (Gerstenberg Verlag, Hildeshelm, 1979). We would do well to read Mehrtens and some of the early papers on our subject. In the meantime, for your enjoyment, here are a translations of a couple.

The first is a couple sections of Dedekind's Supplement XI to Dirichlet's Vorlesung uber Zahlentheorie, where he introduces the modular law, studied at greater length in the classic paper of 1900.

The second is a section from Skolem's 1920 paper that contains a solution to the word problem for finitely presented lattices. (Thanks to Stan Burris for finding out about this!) See our chapter on finitely presented lattices in Lattice Theory: STA for a modern treatment.