Tamari lattices originated from weakenings or reinterpretations of the familar associativity law. This has been the subject of Dov Tamari's thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1951 and the central theme of his subsequent mathematical work. Tamari lattices can be realized in terms of polytopes called associahedra, which in fact also appeared first in Tamari's thesis.

By now these beautiful structures have made their appearance in many different areas of pure and applied mathematics, such as algebra, combinatorics, computer science, category theory, geometry, topology, and also in...