A well written, readable and easily accessible introduction to "Choquet theory," which treats the representation of elements of a compact convex set as integral averages over extreme points of the set. The interest in this material arises both from its appealing geometrical nature as well as its extraordinarily wide range of application to areas ranging from approximation theory to ergodic theory. Many of these applications are treated in this book. This second edition is an expanded and updated version of what has become a classic basic reference in the subject.

Starting with convex functions on the line, this title leads to interconnected topics in convexity, differentiability and subdifferentiability of convex functions in Banach spaces, generic continuity of monotone operators, geometry of Banach spaces and the Radon-Nikodym property, convex analysis, variational principles and perturbed optimization.