This book presents an elementary introduction to the theory of oriented matroids. The way oriented matroids are intro- duced emphasizes that they are the most general - and hence simplest - structures for which linear Programming Duality results can be stated and proved. The main theme of the book is duality. Using Farkas' Lemma as the basis the authors start withre- sults on polyhedra in Rn and show how to restate the essence of the proofs in terms of sign patterns of oriented ma- troids. Most of the standard material in Linear Programming is presented in the setting of real space as well as...

In the late forties, Mathematical Programming became a scientific discipline in its own right. Since then it has experienced a tremendous growth. Beginning with economic and military applications, it is now among the most important fields of applied mathematics with extensive use in engineering, natural sciences, economics, and biological sciences. The lively activity in this area is demonstrated by the fact that as early as 1949 the first "Symposium on Mathe- matical Programming" took place in Chicago. Since then mathematical programmers from all over the world have gath- ered at the...