Resulting from papers from Algebraic, Extremal and Metric Combinatorics 1986 conference held at the University of Montreal, this book represents a comprehensive overview of the present state of progress in three related areas of combinatorics. Topics covered in the articles include association shemes, extremal problems, combinatorial geometries and matroids, and designs. All the papers contain new results and many are extensive surveys of particular areas of research.

In the summer of 1991 the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the Universite de Montreal was fortunate to host the NATO Advanced Study Institute "Algebras and Orders" as its 30th Seminaire de mathematiques superieures (SMS), a summer school with a long tradition and well-established reputation. This book contains the contributions of the invited speakers. Universal algebra- which established itself only in the 1930's- grew from traditional algebra (e.g., groups, modules, rings and lattices) and logic (e.g., propositional calculus, model theory and the theory of relations). It started...