This award supports the research of Professor L. Billera to work in combinatorics. He intends to investigate polyhedral subdivisions and their relationship to convex polytopes and multivariate splines. He also intends to continue the study of fibre polytopes with a view to further developing their applications to computational algebraic geometry and algebraic topology. The research is in the general area of combinatorics. Combinatorics attempts to find efficient methods to study how discrete collections of objects can be organized. And, so it is extremely important to modern communications, for example the design of large networks as in telephone systems and the design of algorithms in computer science.
