An accessible introduction to convex algebraic geometry and semidefinite optimization. For graduate students and researchers in mathematics and computer science.

This book on the foundations of Euclidean geometry aims to present the subject from the point of view of present day mathematics, taking advantage of all the developments since the appearance of Hilbert's classic work. Here real affine space is characterised by a small number of axioms involving points and line segments making the treatment self-contained and thorough, many results being established under weaker hypotheses than usual. The treatment should be totally accessible for final year undergraduates and graduate students, and can also serve as an introduction to other areas of mathematics such as matroids and antimatroids, combinatorial convexity, the theory of polytopes, projective geometry and functional analysis.

Convexity is a simple idea that manifests itself in a surprising variety of places. This fertile field has an immensely rich structure and numerous applications. Barvinok demonstrates that simplicity, intuitive appeal, and the universality of applications make teaching (and learning) convexity a gratifying experience. The book will benefit both teacher and student: It is easy to understand, entertaining to the reader, and includes many exercises that vary in degree of difficulty. Overall, the author demonstrates the power of a few simple unifying principles in a variety of pure and applied problems. The prerequisites are minimal amounts of linear algebra, analysis, and elementary topology, plus basic computational skills. Portions of the book could be used by advanced undergraduates. As a whole, it is designed for graduate students interested in mathematical methods, computer science, electrical engineering, and operations research. The book will also be of interest to research mathematicians, who will find some results that are recent, some that are new, and many known results that are discussed from a new perspective.

This volume presents easy-to-understand yet surprising properties obtained using topological, geometric and graph theoretic tools in the areas covered by the Geometry Conference that took place in Mulhouse, France from September 7–11, 2014 in honour of Tudor Zamfirescu on the occasion of his 70th anniversary. The contributions address subjects in convexity and discrete geometry, in distance geometry or with geometrical flavor in combinatorics, graph theory or non-linear analysis. Written by top experts, these papers highlight the close connections between these fields, as well as ties to other domains of geometry and their reciprocal influence. They offer an overview on recent developments in geometry and its border with discrete mathematics, and provide answers to several open questions. The volume addresses a large audience in mathematics, including researchers and graduate students interested in geometry and geometrical problems.

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.

This book provides a self-contained introduction to convex geometry in Euclidean space. After covering the basic concepts and results, it develops Brunn–Minkowski theory, with an exposition of mixed volumes, the Brunn–Minkowski inequality, and some of its consequences, including the isoperimetric inequality. Further central topics are then treated, such as surface area measures, projection functions, zonoids, and geometric valuations. Finally, an introduction to integral-geometric formulas in Euclidean space is provided. The numerous exercises and the supplementary material at the end of each section form an essential part of the book. Convexity is an elementary and natural concept. It plays a key role in many mathematical fields, including functional analysis, optimization, probability theory, and stochastic geometry. Paving the way to the more advanced and specialized literature, the material will be accessible to students in the third year and can be covered in one semester.

Handbook of Convex Geometry, Volume B offers a survey of convex geometry and its many ramifications and connections with other fields of mathematics, including convexity, lattices, crystallography, and convex functions. The selection first offers information on the geometry of numbers, lattice points, and packing and covering with convex sets. Discussions focus on packing in non-Euclidean spaces, problems in the Euclidean plane, general convex bodies, computational complexity of lattice point problem, centrally symmetric convex bodies, reduction theory, and lattices and the space of lattices. The text then examines finite packing and covering and tilings, including plane tilings, monohedral tilings, bin packing, and sausage problems. The manuscript takes a look at valuations and dissections, geometric crystallography, convexity and differential geometry, and convex functions. Topics include differentiability, inequalities, uniqueness theorems for convex hypersurfaces, mixed discriminants and mixed volumes, differential geometric characterization of convexity, reduction of quadratic forms, and finite groups of symmetry operations. The selection is a dependable source of data for mathematicians and researchers interested in convex geometry.

The study of high-dimensional convex bodies from a geometric and analytic point of view, with an emphasis on the dependence of various parameters on the dimension stands at the intersection of classical convex geometry and the local theory of Banach spaces. It is also closely linked to many other fields, such as probability theory, partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry, harmonic analysis and combinatorics. It is now understood that the convexity assumption forces most of the volume of a high-dimensional convex body to be concentrated in some canonical way and the main question is whether, under some natural normalization, the answer to many fundamental questions should be independent of the dimension. The aim of this book is to introduce a number of well-known questions regarding the distribution of volume in high-dimensional convex bodies, which are exactly of this nature: among them are the slicing problem, the thin shell conjecture and the Kannan-Lovász-Simonovits conjecture. This book provides a self-contained and up to date account of the progress that has been made in the last fifteen years.

Different Faces of Geometry - edited by the world renowned geometers S. Donaldson, Ya. Eliashberg, and M. Gromov - presents the current state, new results, original ideas and open questions from the following important topics in modern geometry: These apparently diverse topics have a common feature in that they are all areas of exciting current activity. The Editors have attracted an impressive array of leading specialists to author chapters for this volume: G. Mikhalkin (USA-Canada-Russia), V.D. Milman (Israel) and A.A. Giannopoulos (Greece), C. LeBrun (USA), Ko Honda (USA), P. Ozsvath (USA) and Z. Szabo (USA), C. Simpson (France), D. Joyce (UK) and P. Seidel (USA), and S. Bauer (Germany). One can distinguish various themes running through the different contributions. There is some emphasis on invariants defined by elliptic equations and their applications in low-dimensional topology, symplectic and contact geometry (Bauer, Seidel, Ozsvath and Szabo). These ideas enter, more tangentially, in the articles of Joyce, Honda and LeBrun.Here and elsewhere, as well as explaining the rapid advances that have been made, the articles convey a wonderful sense of the vast areas lying beyond our current understanding. Simpson's article emphasizes the need for interesting new constructions (in that case of Kahler and algebraic manifolds), a point which is also made by Bauer in the context of 4-manifolds and the 11/8 conjecture. LeBrun's article gives another perspective on 4-manifold theory, via Riemannian geometry, and the challenging open questions involving the geometry of even well-known 4-manifolds. There are also striking contrasts between the articles. The authors have taken different approaches: for example, the thoughtful essay of Simpson, the new research results of LeBrun and the thorough expositions with homework problems of Honda. One can also ponder the differences in the style of mathematics. In the articles of Honda, Giannopoulos and Milman, and Mikhalkin, the geometry is present in a very vivid and tangible way; combining respectively with topology, analysis and algebra.The papers of Bauer and Seidel, on the other hand, makes the point that algebraic and algebro-topological abstraction (triangulated categories, spectra) can play an important role in very unexpected ways in concrete geometric problems. - From the Preface by the Editors