# anyone help me about incidence algebra?

• Jan 26th 2009, 05:47 AM
bogazichili
anyone help me about incidence algebra?
what is incidence algebra? what does it include? what is its applications? anyone send me lecture notes?
• Jan 26th 2009, 03:10 PM
NonCommAlg
Quote:

Originally Posted by bogazichili

what is incidence algebra?

let $R$ be a commutative domain and $(I, \leq)$ a (not necessarily finite) partially ordered set with this property that for any $i,j \in I$ with $i \leq j,$ the set: $[i,j]=\{k \in I: \ i \leq k \leq j \}$ is finite.

now let $A$ be the set of all $|I| \times |I|$ matrices $X=[x_{ij}], \ \ i,j \in I, \ x_{ij} \in R,$ such that $x_{ij}=0$ unless $i \leq j.$ so the rows and columns of elements of $A$ are indexed by $I$ and the entries of

them are in $R.$ the addition and multiplication of elements of $A$ is the usual addition and multiplication of matrixes. the identity matrix is clearly the identity element of $A.$

note that if $X=[x_{ij}], \ Y=[y_{ij}]$ are in $A,$ and $Z=XY=[z_{ij}],$ then for $i \leq j$ we have $z_{ij}=\sum_{i \leq k \leq j}x_{ik}y_{kj},$ which is a finite sum since, as we assumed, the set $[i,j]$ is finite. you still need

to do a little work to see that $A$ is closed under addition and multiplication. so $A$ is an $R$ algebra and we call $A$ an incidence algebra. it's a nice and simple fact that an element $X=[x_{ij}]$

of $A$ is invertible if and only if $x_{ii}$ is a unit in $R$ for all $i \in I.$ also note that if we label elements of $I$ in a way that $i$ comes before $j$ whenever $i \leq j,$ then every element of $A$ would be an

upper triangular matrix. so if $I$ is totally ordered, then $A$ would be exactly the ring of all $|I| \times |I|$ upper triangular matrices with entries in $R.$

i haven't seen incidence algebras in ring theory yet but it seems that they have important applications in discrete math.

Edit:

there's a book called "Incidence Algebras" and the authors are: Eugene Spiegel and Christopher O'Donnel. i can see from "google search book" that in this book incident algebras are studied

in an abstract ring theory way, and so, i don't know about you, but i'm gonna get the book soon!
• Jan 26th 2009, 05:03 PM
GaloisTheory1
here.