B. Korte - Böcker

Poverty and inequality have gained a new public presence in the United Kingdom. Literature, and particularly narrative literature, (re-)configures how people think, feel and behave in relation to poverty. This makes the analysis of poverty-themed fiction an important aspect in the new transdisciplinary field of poverty studies.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the workshop "Optimierung und Operations Research", held at the Elly Holterhoff Backing Stift (Bad Honnef) of the University of Bonn, October 2-8, 1977. This conference was devoted to recent advances in the field of mathe- matical programming, optimization techniques, and operations research. It was attended by about 50 invited participants. Furthermore many scholars in these areas showed a great interest in this workshop, despite several other conferences and activities on similar topics in the year 1977. The organizers regret that considerations of avail- able space for conference activities limited the number of participants. This widespread interest, the high quality of the lectures presented and the active and stimulating discussions at the conference mani- fested the breadth of the activity ongoing in the field covered by this workshop and the necessity that this field be cultivated to a greater extent by the scientific community.The workshop was organized by the Institute of Operations Research (Sonderforschungsbereich 21), University of Bonn and was generously sponsored by the Gesellschaft der Freunde und Forderer der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat and by IBM Germany. Only through this invaluable support was this workshop possible; for this the editors wish to express their sincere thanks and appreciation. Bonn, December 1977 R. Henn B. Korte W. Oettli III TABLE OF CONTENTS A. Bachem The theorem of Minkowski for polyhedral monoids and aggregated linear diophantine systems * * * . * * * * * * * S. Baum and L.E. Trotter, Jr.

This monograph attempts to unify different mathematical approaches and to lead the reader from fundamental results in matroid theory to the current state-of-the-art in open research problems. It reviews classical concepts from matroid theory and extends them to greedoids ("greedy" algorithms).