Factorization of the Characteristic Polynomial

We introduce a new method for showing that the roots of the characteristic polynomial of a finite lattice are all nonnegative integers. Our method gives two simple conditions under which the characteristic polynomial factors. We will see that Stanley's Supersolvability Theorem is a corollary of this result. We can also use this method to demonstrate a new result in graph theory and give new proofs of some classic results concerning the Möbius function.