A fundamental result in universal algebra is the Subdirect Representation Theorem, which tells us how to decompose an algebra into its "basic parts". Formally, we say that is a subdirect product of , , ..., when is a subalgebra of the product
and for each index we have for the projection that . In other words, a subdirect product "uses each component completely", but may be smaller than the full product.
A trivial circumstance is that is an isomorphism for some . The remaining components would then be superfluous. If an algebra has the property than any way of representing it as a subdirect product is trivial in this sense, we say that is "subdirectly irreducible".
Subdirectly irreducible algebras generalize simple algebras. Subdirectly irreducible groups include all simple groups, as well as the cyclic -groups and the Prüfer groups .
In the case of lattices, there is no known classification of the finite subdirectly irreducible (or simple) lattices. This page (https://math.chapman.edu/~jipsen/posets/si_lattices92.html) by Peter Jipsen has diagrams showing the 92 different nontrivial subdirectly irreducible lattices of order at most 8. See any patterns?
We know that every finite subdirectly irreducible lattice can be extended to a simple lattice by adding at most two new elements (Lemma 2.3 from Grätzer's "The Congruences of a Finite Lattice", https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.06539), so there must be oodles of finite simple lattices out there.