On the Structure of Acyclic Binary Relations

Abstract

We investigate the structure of acyclic binary relations from different points of view. On the one hand, given a nonempty set we study real-valued bivariate maps that satisfy suitable functional equations, in a way that their associated binary relation is acyclic. On the other hand, we consider acyclic directed graphs as well as their representation by means of incidence matrices. Acyclic binary relations can be extended to the asymmetric part of a linear order, so that, in particular, any directed acyclic graph has a topological sorting.