polymake is a modular software system to study and visualize objects
from various fields of discrete mathematics, especially convex
polytopes, finite simplicial complexes, graphs, and (as of version
2.1) tropical geometry. For basic usage the user specifies an object
(e.g., a polytope) and issues queries to the polymake system in order
to learn about properties of this object, without the need to specify
which algorithms to use in order to compute the desired results. In
this way the system behaves much like an expert system.
While also previous versions allowed extensions in both, Perl and C++,
the new version 2.1 introduces high-level Perl scripts as a new key
feature. This allows to use polymake in a much more flexible way, for
instance, to conveniently obtain census data of large classes of
objects, but also to ease more intricate constructions of polytopes
and other objects.
The presentation will be focused on how the users with different
programming skills (starting from zero) can productively use and
extend polymake functionality.
polymake is an open source project designed to run in a UNIX-alike
environment. It is available for download at
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/polymake.
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