Oh cieca cupidigia, oh ira folie, Che si ci sproni nella vita corta, E nell' eterna poi si mal c'immolle! o blind greediness and foolish rage, That in our fleeting life so goads us on And plunges us in boiling blood for ever! Dante, The Divine Comedy Inferno, XII, 17, 49/51. On an afternoon hike during the second Oberwolfach conference on Mathematical Programming in January 1981, two of the authors of this book discussed a paper by another two of the authors (Korte and Schrader [1981]) on approximation schemes for optimization problems over independence systems and matroids. They had noticed that in many proofs the hereditary property of independence systems and matroids is not needed: it is not required that every subset of a feasible set is again feasible. A much weaker property is sufficient, namely that every feasible set of cardinality k contains (at least) one feasible subset of cardinality k - 1. We called this property accessibility, and that was the starting point of our investigations on greedoids.

Autorentext
Bernhard Korte ist Professor an der Universität Bonn und leitet seit 1987 das Forschungsinstitut für Diskrete Mathematik in Bonn. Er befasst sich vor allem mit kombinatorischer Optimierung. Im von ihm gegründeten Arithmeum in Bonn sind eine Vielzahl historischer Rechenmaschinen zu sehen. Bernhard Korte war Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. 1997 erhielt er den Staatspreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen und 2002 das Große Bundesverdienstkreuz. Des weiteren ist er Träger des großen Verdienstordens der Republik Italien und Honorarprofessor der Academia Sinica in Peking und der PUC (päpstliche katholische Universität) in Rio de Janeiro. Er ist Ehrendoktor an der Universität La Sapienza in Rohm und Mitglied der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina in Halle an der Saale, der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste in Düsseldorf und der Deutschen Akademie der Technikwissenschaften (acatech).

Inhalt
I. Introduction.- 1. Set Systems and Languages.- 2. Graphs, Partially Ordered Sets and Lattices.- II. Abstract Linear Dependence Matroids.- 1. Matroid Axiomatizations.- 2. Matroids and Optimization.- 3. Operations on Matroids.- 4. Submodular Functions and Polymatroids.- III. Abstract Convexity Antimatroids.- 1. Convex Geometries and Shelling Processes.- 2. Examples of Antimatroids.- 3. Circuits and Paths.- 4. Helly's Theorem and Relatives.- 5. Ramsey-type Results.- 6. Representations of Antimatroids.- IV. General Exchange Structures Greedoids.- 1. Basic Facts.- 2. Examples of Greedoids.- V. Structural Properties.- 1. Rank Function.- 2. Closure Operators.- 3. Rank and Closure Feasibility.- 4. Minors and Extensions.- 5. Interval Greedoids.- VI. Further Structural Properties.- 1. Lattices Associated with Greedoids.- 2. Connectivity in Greedoids.- VII. Local Poset Greedoids.- 1. Polymatroid Greedoids.- 2. Local Properties of Local Poset Greedoids.- 3. Excluded Minors for Local Posets.- 4. Paths in Local Poset Greedoids.- 5. Excluded Minors for Undirected Branchings Greedoids.- VIII. Greedoids on Partially Ordered Sets.- 1. Supermatroids.- 2. Ordered Geometries.- 3. Characterization of Ordered Geometries.- 4. Minimal and Maximal Ordered Geometries.- IX. Intersection, Slimming and Trimming.- 1. Intersections of Greedoids and Antimatroids.- 2. The Meet of a Matroid and an Antimatroid.- 3. Balanced Interval Greedoids.- 4. Exchange Systems and Gauss Greedoids.- X. Transposition Greedoids.- 1. The Transposition Property.- 2. Applications of the Transposition Property.- 3. Simplicial Elimination.- XI. Optimization in Greedoids.- 1. General Objective Functions.- 2. Linear Functions.- 3. Polyhedral Descriptions.- 4. Transversals and Partial Transversals.- 5.Intersection of Supermatroids.- XII. Topological Results for Greedoids.- 1. A Brief Review of Topological Prerequisites.- 2. Shellability of Greedoids and the Partial Tutte Polynomial.- 3. Homotopy Properties of Greedoids.- References.- Notation Index.- Author Index.- Inclusion Chart (inside the back cover).