Customer Reviews

Grobner Bases and Convex Polytopes (University Lecture Series, No. 8)

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I cannot recommend this text highly enough to anyone who is working with Grobner bases, especially in computational commutative algebra. Toric ideals, the state polytope, several algorithms for computing Grobner bases -- Sturmfels brings all this together, as well as showing how it can all be applied to problems such as that of integer programming.

Thanks to his excellent taste in the theorems he presents, Sturmfels has managed to put all this together in a relatively small, well-written package. However, his brevity has made this a very dense text -- you would do well to keep a copy of Schrijver's Theory of Linear and Integer Programming at hand for proofs of some of the theorems, and if you are like me (a first year grad student) you will invariably need to look in some other algebraic and geometric texts for a more thorough treatment of some of the topics in here.

Another impenetrable text from this author.
Too bad, it was so unnecessary as the subject
easily lends itself to user friendly exposition.