Linear programming is a form of optimization which is a method used in discrete mathematics to solve complex real-life problems, such as the best way to connect 100 cities by telephone cables.

Discrete Mathematics and theoretical computer science are closely linked research areas with strong impacts on applications and various other scientific disciplines. Both fields deeply cross fertilize each other. One of the persons who particularly contributed to building bridges between these and many other areas is Laszlo Lovasz, whose outstanding scientific work has defined and shaped many research directions in the past 40 years. A number of friends and colleagues, all top authorities in their fields of expertise gathered at the two conferences in August 2008 in Hungary, celebrating...

Since the publication of the first edition of our book, geometric algorithms and combinatorial optimization have kept growing at the same fast pace as before. Nevertheless, we do not feel that the ongoing research has made this book outdated. Rather, it seems that many of the new results build on the models, algorithms, and theorems presented here. For instance, the celebrated Dyer-Frieze-Kannan algorithm for approximating the volume of a convex body is based on the oracle model of convex bodies and uses the ellipsoid method as a preprocessing technique. The polynomial time equivalence of...