Prerequisites

This chapter introduces some notation and reviews basic facts from different fields. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the very elementary concepts in linear algebra and topology of Euclidean n- space as summarized in Section 1.2 and 1.3. Apart from these, the book is essentially selfcontained (with a minor exception of Chapter 9). Section 1.1 introduces the notion of partially ordered sets which is not treated in depth anywhere in this book, but is used to simplify the notation only. Section 1.4 introduces some notions from polyhedral theory.