Taming Polytopes by Lifting

We cover some aspects of the theory of extended formulations, i.e., representations of polytopes that appear wild in one or the other sense as projections of higher-dimensional ones that are much tamer. Our selection of topics is biased towards parts of the work done in our own research group, where the lecture will close with a recent result related to the Hirsch-conjecture on the diameter of polytopes obtained jointly with Kirill Kukharenko.