A short proof of the congruence representation theorem for semimodular lattices

Abstract

In a 1998 paper with H. Lakser, the authors proved that every finite distributive lattice $D$ can be represented as the congruence lattice of a finite \emph{semimodular lattice}. Some ten years later, the first author and E. Knapp proved a much stronger result, proving the representation theorem for \emph{rectangular lattices}. In this note we present a short proof of these results.