Convex Geometry - Historical Note

Historical Note

Convex geometry is a relatively young mathematical discipline. Although the first known contributions to convex geometry date back to antiquity and can be traced in the works of Euclid and Archimedes, it became an independent branch of mathematics at the turn of the 19th century, mainly due to the works of Hermann Brunn and Hermann Minkowski in dimensions two and three. A big part of their results was soon generalized to spaces of higher dimensions, and in 1934 T. Bonnesen and W. Fenchel gave a comprehensive survey of convex geometry in Euclidean space Rn. Further development of convex geometry in the 20th century and its relations to numerous mathematical disciplines are summarized in the Handbook of convex geometry edited by P. M. Gruber and J. M. Wills.