ABSTRACT
Linear programming has many important practical applications, and has also given rise to a wide body of theory. See Section 49.9 for recommended sources. Here we consider the linear programming problem in the form of maximizing a linear function of d variables subject to n linear inequalities. We focus on the relationship of the problem to computational geometry, i.e., we consider the problem in small dimension. More precisely, we concentrate on the case where d ≪ n $ d\ll n $ https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315119601/fb8178cb-c53c-4311-b072-eff5ec016aba/content/inline-math49_1.tif"/> , i.e., d = d ( n ) $ d = d(n) $ https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315119601/fb8178cb-c53c-4311-b072-eff5ec016aba/content/inline-math49_2.tif"/> is a function that grows very slowly with n. By linear programming duality, this also includes the case n ≪ d $ n \ll d $ https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315119601/fb8178cb-c53c-4311-b072-eff5ec016aba/content/inline-math49_3.tif"/> . This has been called fixed-dimensional linear programming, though our viewpoint here will not treat d as constant. In this case there are strongly polynomial algorithms, provided the rate of growth of d with n is small enough.
