An Invitation to Ehrhart Theory: Polyhedral Geometry and its Applications in Enumerative Combinatorics

Felix Breuer

Published 2014-05-29, updated 2014-07-22Version 2

In this expository article we give an introduction to Ehrhart theory, i.e., the theory of integer points in polyhedra, and take a tour through its applications in enumerative combinatorics. Topics include geometric modeling in combinatorics, Ehrhart's method for proving that a couting function is a polynomial, the connection between polyhedral cones, rational functions and quasisymmetric functions, methods for bounding coefficients, combinatorial reciprocity theorems, algorithms for counting integer points in polyhedra and computing rational function representations, as well as visualizations of the greatest common divisor and the Euclidean algorithm.