Fibre tilings

Generalizing an earlier notion of secondary polytopes, Billera and Sturmfels introduced the important concept of fibre polytopes, and showed how they were related to certain kinds of subdivision induced by the projection of one polytope onto another. There are two obvious ways in which this concept can be extended: first, to possibly unbounded polyhedra, and second, by making the definition a categorical one. In the course of these investigations, it became clear that the whole subject fitted even more naturally into the context of finite tilings which admit strong duals. In turn, this new approach provides more unified and perspicuous explanations of many previously known but apparently quite disparate results.