Download or read book Combinatorial Convexity and Algebraic Geometry written by Guenter Ewald and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1996-10-03 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is an introduction to the theory of convex polytopes and polyhedral sets, to algebraic geometry, and to the connections between these fields, known as the theory of toric varieties. The first part of the book covers the theory of polytopes and provides large parts of the mathematical background of linear optimization and of the geometrical aspects in computer science. The second part introduces toric varieties in an elementary way.