Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th China-Japan Conference on Discrete Geometry, Combinatorics and Graph Theory, CJCDGCGT 2005, held in Tianjin, China, as well as in Xi'an, China, in November 2005.

Book Description

Convex functions play an important role in almost all branches of mathematics as well as other areas of science and engineering. This book is a thorough introduction to contemporary convex function theory addressed to all people whose research or teaching interests intersect with the field of convexity. It covers a large variety of subjects, from the one real variable case (with all its mathematical gems) to some of the most advanced topics such as Choquet's theory, the Prékopa-Leindler type inequalities and their ramifications, as well as the variational approach of partial differential equations and convex programming. Many results are new and the whole book reflects the authors own experience, both in teaching and research. The book can serve as a reference and source of inspiration to researchers in several branches of mathematics and engineering and it can also be used for graduate courses.

Book Description
The book deals with the combinatorial geometry of convex bodies in finite-dimensional spaces. A general introduction to geometric convexity is followed by the investigation of d-convexity and H-convexity, and by various applications. Recent research is discussed, for example the three (generally unsolved) problems from the combinatorial geometry of convex bodies: the Szoekefalvi-Nagy problem, the Borsuk problem, the Hadwiger covering problem. These and related questions are then applied to a new class of convex bodies which is a natural generalization of the class of zonoids: the class of belt bodies. Finally open research problems are discussed. ... Read more

Book Description
At the heart of this monograph is the Brunn-Minkowski theory. It can be used to great effect in studying such ideas as volume and surface area and the generalizations of these. In particular the notions of mixed volume and mixed area arise naturally and the fundamental inequalities that are satisfied by mixed volumes are considered in detail. The author presents a comprehensive introduction to convex bodies and gives full proofs for some deeper theorems that have never previously been brought together. Many hints and pointers to connections with other fields are given, and an exhaustive reference list is included. ... Read more

Book Description
In this short book, the authors discuss three types of problems from combinatorial geometry: Borsuk's partition problem, covering convex bodies by smaller homothetic bodies, and the illumination problem. They show how closely related these problems are to each other. All of the material in the book is fairly recent yet the presentation is elementary, with no more than high-school mathematics and an interest in geometry required to follow the arguments. Most of the discussion is restricted to two- and three-dimensional Euclidean space, though sometimes more general results and problems are given. Thus even the mathematically unsophisticated reader can grasp some of the results of a branch of twentieth-century mathematics that has applications in such disciplines as mathematical programming, operations research and theoretical computer science. At the end of the book the authors have collected together a set of unsolved and partially-solved problems that a sixth-form student should be able to understand and even attempt to solve. ... Read more

Book Description

Convex Polyhedra is one of the classics in geometry. There simply is no other book with so many of the aspects of the theory of 3-dimensional convex polyhedra in a comparable way, and in anywhere near its detail and completeness. It is the definitive source of the classical field of convex polyhedra and contains the available answers to the question of the data uniquely determining a convex polyhedron. This question concerns all data pertinent to a polyhedron, e.g. the lengths of edges, areas of faces, etc. This vital and clearly written book includes the basics of convex polyhedra and collects the most general existence theorems for convex polyhedra that are proved by a new and unified method. It is a wonderful source of ideas for students.

Book Description
This volume contains a fairly complete picture of the geometry of numbers, including relations to other branches of mathematics such as analytic number theory, diophantine approximation, coding and numerical analysis. It deals with convex or non-convex bodies and lattices in euclidean space, etc.

This second edition was prepared jointly by P.M. Gruber and the author of the first edition. The authors have retained the existing text (with minor corrections) while adding to each chapter supplementary sections on the more recent developments. While this method may have drawbacks, it has the definite advantage of showing clearly where recent progress has taken place and in what areas interesting results may be expected in the future. ... Read more

Book Description
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second Japanese Conference on Discrete and Computational Geometry, JCDCG8, held in Tokyo, Japan, in December 1999. The 27 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the post-conference proceedings. Among the topics addressed are approximation, convex hulls, lattice computations, tilings, graph computations, Voronoi diagrams, clustering, graph drawing, diagram design, and illumination problems. ... Read more

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Book Description
The theory of toric varieties (also called torus embeddings) describes a fascinating interplay between algebraic geometry and the geometry of convex figures in real affine spaces. This book is a unified up-to-date survey of the various results and interesting applications found since toric varieties were introduced in the early 1970's. It is an updated and corrected English edition of the author's book in Japanese published by Kinokuniya, Tokyo in 1985. Toric varieties are here treated as complex analytic spaces. Without assuming much prior knowledge of algebraic geometry, the author shows how elementary convex figures give rise to interesting complex analytic spaces. Easily visualized convex geometry is then used to describe algebraic geometry for these spaces, such as line bundles, projectivity, automorphism groups, birational transformations, differential forms and Mori's theory. Hence this book might serve as an accessible introduction to current algebraic geometry. Conversely, the algebraic geometry of toric varieties gives new insight into continued fractions as well as their higher-dimensional analogues, the isoperimetric problem and other questions on convex bodies. Relevant results on convex geometry are collected together in the appendix. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Advanced but readable
This book is an advanced overview of the theory of toric varieties written for individuals with a strong background in algebraic geometry, topology, and algebra. It is very formal and not for a beginning course.

The author moves right into the necessary convex geometry in the first section of Chapter 1 and then defines a toric variety in the next section. He does not hesitate to use diagrams to illustrate the examples, which is good given the level of abstraction he employs in the book. The fundamental group of a toric variety is given an explicit characterization, but the proof is omitted unfortunately. This is followed by a discussion of when a toric variety is compact and nonsingular, with detailed proofs given. The Hironaka resolution of singularities theorem is discussed for toric varieties, the proof being a lot simpler of course in this case. A concrete realization of singularity resolution using continued fractions is given in the next section. The chapter ends with a very detailed and superb discussion of the birational geometry of toric varieties.

The next chapter is very involved and deals with Cartier divisors on toric varieties and toric projective varieties. The latter are related to convex polytopes by means of moment maps. In particular, integral convex polytopes have many connections with toric projective varieties, and these are outlined in detail in this chapter. A toric version of Mori's theorem is also outlined. Toric varieties offer a nice, intuitive picture of Mori's program for rational curves on projective varieties.

Chapter 3 deals with differential forms on toric varieties. The author employs the sheaf of germs of holomorphic vector fields with logarithmic zeroes and the sheaf of germs of p-forms with logarithmic poles to study holomorphic differential forms over toric varieties. In addition, Ishida complexes are used to study complexes of coherent sheaves on toric varieties. A very interesting discussion on the automorphism groups of toric varieties is given in terms of Cremona groups.

The last chapter discusses applications, such as Mumford toroidal embeddings, quotients of toric varieties, semisimple algebraic groups, and Newton polyhedra. Unfortunately, the author does not expound on these, but refers the reader to the literature. Instead, the author explains how to construct complex manifolds in dimension two by taking the quotient of an open set of a toric variety with respect to an action of a discrete map. Some interesting examples of compact quotientsof toric varieties are given, including complex tori, Hopf surfaces, and Inoue surfaces. The latter, for the case of parabolic Inoue surfaces, use elliptic curves in their constructions, interestingly.

The book does contain a review of convex geometry for a reader not well-versed in this area. There is a lot in this book, even though it is short. The price is very high so only for individuals seriously interested in this topic. ... Read more